It's another thing entirely to have 7 billion people jammed together cheek-by-jowl, and tolerate individuals amongst us who fundamentally don't understand the sanctity of other's property, person, or life.
The sanctity which is best exemplified by willingness to declare other people "broken" and thus discardable?
I'd say that the reason crime is so rampant in the US is because it's obviously rewarding, even prison sentences are just a multi-semester term in "crime school".
I don't think punishments are draconian enough.
You are wrong. Surprisingly, beating people until they learn that beating people is wrong doesn't actually work.
Anyone who is Christian and believes what's in Revelations, should be against regulating money.
Christianity? Funny, that reminds me of this guy Jesus who said something about not obsessing about money - in fact you should give it all to the poor to get a treasure in Heaven (funny how bibilical literalists never interpret that part literally). Good thing American Evangelicals are here to set the record right.
Bitcoin and others have come about because a need has been recognized. What is the need? A stable currency that can't be as easily manipulated at the whim of the issuing agency? Yeah, that's probably the need they're addressing.
Internet cash, actually: a fast and convenient way of making payment from person to person without trusting the sender, recipient or any third parties.
They'll have enough wealth to continue to live like gods, but instead of having to send their money off to other people as risky investments, they'll be able to simply make sure to never spend their hoard faster than it appreciates in value.
And that's fine. To put it bluntly, money is just paper and gold is just bling. If you never spend your wealth, it's like it didn't exist; from economy's point of view there's no difference between someone who sits on a trillion dollars but only spends what he must to avoid starving to death and someone who barely makes enough to avoid starving to death.
It's not your greenbacks or gold coins that build a factory; it's the people, equipment and raw materials that do it. If Joe McDuck doesn't want to buy them, then all that means is that Joe Glamgold gets them cheaper.
You would create an entire class of people who would control the substantial majority of human wealth and would have strong incentive to completely disconnect themselves from productive activity.
That might be an improvement over the current situation where speculation and outright manipulation disturb said productive activity to the detriment of everyone.
Nobody ever stops and asks the question "why must SOMETHING be done" and then try to figure out what that "SOMETHING" ought to be.
Perhaps. But when a US senator makes a proposal that simultaneously attacks anonymity and attempts to crush a potential competitor against established big business, it's "perhaps" as in "perhaps the guy who was about to testify against don Carnage really accidentally shot himself in the face with a shotgun six times": possible, but hardly the simplest explanation.
Even then, my sympathy is limited because I would personally insist in having a clause in the contract to terminate early when big script changes occur.
I guess making such demands as to keep you from ever appearing in any movie would be an effective way to avoid being in this situation.
I make enough to live my lifestyle, and that's all that is important to me.
My apologies, I thought the fact that you were posting on a Slashdot discussion about city planning implied you had an interest in the subject.
I don't go out of my way to hurt or inhibit others, but I'm not gonna sacrifice my pleasures and enjoyment of this short life for a 'cause' or the "greater good". Why should I?
the dime only has value because it can hire someone else
That might also indicate a problem with current dimes.
True, but current technology is still incapable of making each dime a small fully-functioning robot, so it can't really be helped.
enchanting the relevant classes.
?UNDEFINED VALUE
If people are making stupid choices concerning their post-elementary education, then elementary school should teach them about their options and their likely consequences.
Different question: is it okay for the state to tell someone who they must do business with?
Of course not, that would be slavery. Now making doing business with any comer a condition of getting some legal benefit, such as incorporation, on the other hand... Also, in a multi-owner company, it's very questionable whether turning down customers because of their sexuality is legal simply because it's losing shareholders money.
But why should they have cared? It wasn't their money that was stolen. The theft was an externality. And if there's something we know about free markets, they are great EXCEPT when they involve externalities.
They should had cared because a good portion of that $369 million likely belonged to the people selling their stuff over various Silk Road follow-ups, and at least some of those are bound to be traditional gangsters trying to expand and modernize their business, thus it's entirely possible those externalities are forcibly re-internalized in the form of bullets.
Do you have some reason why Bitcoin should be excluded?
That's my point, so long as you fail to grasp that Bitcoin is a trade token (on par with casino chips or trading stamps), you won't grasp why events have transpired as they have.
What has transpired is a sloppy banker got robbed by a clever thief, and now his customers are buthurt, despite being warned time and again that it's a bad idea to let a total stranger keep their money for them. What does any of this has to do with any property of Bitcoin?
No one. But it is the most efficient way to house people. A society where everyone owns a house and a yard is going to be wasting far more resources to provide the same level of services to those people than one where they live in large apartment buildings.
Is that tradeoff worth it? Maybe. But it is a tradeoff, and leaves less economic output to spend in other areas. And it will only get worse with peak oil and the associated energy crisis.
So if you like suburban living, you'd better hope electric cars and either nuclear or super-efficient solar catch on. That's pretty much the only scenario where it's sustainable.
Every person can own 1 robot, that person can work, or the robot can work. Crporation can not own robot, but they can lease them from people.
Corporation can make robots, but can not use the robots they make for work.
Thus artificially limiting production and everyone's quality of life. Not good. Just give everyone guaranteed food, shelter, Internet access and hours - and all the resources needed to use them - at a makerbot.
The last time cuts of this nature were proposed the idea was to entirely stand down the US Marine Corps. (Still beating that drum today).
Because we were never going to have to invade any country again.
Then Saddam over ran Kuwait, and was looking hungrily at Saudi Arabia.
Guess who arrived first ?
So... is that intended as praise for the marines or to make rather nasty implications about them? Or possibly even as a threat? Because it could be read either way.
It's a credit to the Slashdot community that something worthwhile came out of it. Back in the day Taco would have gathered up some alternative views and added a line or two to balance out the summary, but not these days.
Well, life is all about making something good from whatever you have. All editors can't be delicious.
NO. You can actually "create" Bitcoins at home by "mining" them. (If you want to get technical, you are actually discovering them, but it's called mining.) This is NOT the same as confirming transactions.
YES. What "mining" actually is is solving transaction blocks (if you want to get technical, finding nonce values that make the block's hash be smaller than the current difficulty) and thus lengthening the blockchain, decreasing the chance that an attacker can replace it after a certain point with an alternate history. You are not "discovering" Bitcoins, you are getting an extra reward on top of transaction fees, both as an incentive and to bootstrap the initial distribution of the coins.
I know... I've mined some.
The ability to start a fully automated client and let it work in no way implies any kind of understanding of how Bitcoin operates, any more than starting a computer implies understanding of chip design.
Now once in a while you'll get the retard who just fails and smears shit everywhere, but thankfully they're only impacting themselves.
And this is where the analogy breaks down. People who set educational standards don't just impact themselves. They impact the students, their community, every community the children will ever be a part of, the greater communities they're parts of and so on right to the world at large. They aren't just smearing themselves in shit, they're forcibly shitting on children.
Saying "communities should be allowed to set their own standards" is equivalent to saying "community members have no rights".
The "Pay It Forward" proposal amounts to an entitlement view on life that everyone is "owed" a right to higher education on someone else's dime.
No, it represents the rather reasonable view that the dime only has value because it can hire someone else, directly (services) or indirectly (products). Making sure that people capable of performing valuable work remain available in the dollar ecosystem is thus necessary to ensure the holder of said currency can cash in the debt implied by the bill. This requires education, and it is only fitting that those who benefit from it take part in paying for it.
How many students are on educational tracks for occupations that will not pay enough to allow them to re-pay their debt?
If many are, that implies that they have received bad information about their future prospects - for I very much doubt many people want to be poor - and, as such, the schools have failed in their task. This problem needs to be corrected by enchanting the relevant classes.
It all depends on if you agree with his radical left-wing politics or not. If you do, then he's an angel who can do no wrong.
If your house goes up in a massive explosion a week before you were supposed to testify against a Mafia don, then maybe it was a random gas leak. Maybe. But that's neither the only possible nor even the most credible explanation. And people who point this out might be motivated by factors beyond sympathy for your political opinions.
The fact that Slashdot posts this shit is a sad sign of the slow decline.
I disagree. While the description of Assange is obviously untrustworthy, and most likely an attempt at character assasination, it's quite newsworthy that such attempts continue. It paints a frightening picture of not Assange, but the state of our Western democracies.
Also, Slashdot's discussion system means everyone gets to see both the reactions such a story generates, and even more importantly the moderations they receive. It is quite relevant to all of us and the future of our civilization if such sustained effort to destroy the credibility of resistance actually produces results.
None of us knows anything about Assange from credible sources, so everyone is free to believe what they will. Thus what they choose to believe reflects their pre-existing bias, not unlike in the Zimmerman-Martin affair (where people apparently used their crystal balls to come up with ludicrously detailed blow-by-blow descriptions of what obviously must have happened). It matters little if Assange is a scoundrel, a Cape, or a mere human; but it matters a lot whether people are willing to simply take the government's word of it.
To the truly chaotic a good alignment is impossible.
Depends. The standard alignment grid uses cartesian coordinates. It's "natural" shape is a square where law-chaos and good-evil axis are separate, and ordinal alignments have a greater magnitude of difference from neutrality. On the other hand, the Great Wheel uses a polar alignment system where the type and magnitude of alignment form the axis, thus chaotic good is both less good than neutral good and less chaotic than chaotic neutral of same magnitude.
Bitcoins, unlike dollars, are a commodity. You can literally create them at home. That is why they have an intrinsic value, and why economically speaking they are different from dollars.
True but misleading. What you actually can do at home is confirm Bitcoin transactions, which reinforces transaction history against double-spends. For this service, you receive transaction fees. As an added incentive, you currently also receive newly minted Bitcoins. However, the latter is merely a side effect to help bootstrap the network and provide the initial distribution of coins, and will slowly fade away.
The whole idea of Bitcoins having "intrinsic value" is about the same as claiming miles or newton seconds have an intrinsic value. They are simply arbitrary units of measurement in a distributed ledger system. Bitcoins have no identity, they're simply a unit of magnitude.
But the market is treating as though they were the same. In part because a lot of people don't understand that difference.
No, it's because the market understands what's actually happening. You are simply wrong.
Economically, the intrinsic value of something is approximately: the cost of production + the cost of distribution.
That's usually just called "cost". And "value" is used for how much I'd be willing to pay for it. And for currency, that's not "intrinsic value" but the value of the goods and services I can get with it.
The ideal currency has an intrinsic value and cost of zero.
Unfortunately, today's stock market all too often ignores value and goes by price alone.
That's because stocks are investment vehicles, which means their value is mainly based on how much the owner can get by selling them, which in turn depends on how much other people will value them in the future. That tends to lead to cyles of positive and negative reinforcement.
This all comes down to one basic point: the current stock market is often irrational, because it has gotten to a point where it completely ignores actual value of something and goes by price alone. This is irrational and leads to all kinds of problems.
The actors participating in the market, however, are rational. Their timing might be off, but the overall strategy - buy at the bottom and sell at the top of the cycle - is sound. The overall system is broken, but I'm not sure it can be fixed.
So, keep in mind: if you invest in a cryptocurrency (or anything else, for that matter) at a price that is far above it's "intrinsic value", be careful. You might make money if you know what you're doing, but you could also become the victim of the bubble and lose your shorts at any time.
You aren't investing in a currency, you're investing in the economy that uses that currency - or, to be exact, the right to acquire some of the products of said economy. So the questions here are: what is the total value of goods, services and whatever payable by a particular currency per unit of said currency? How is that ratio likely to evolve in the future (multiple scenarios and their probabilities)? How does that compare to whatever you'd trade it for?
Also, you should never invest your shorts. You can always have a case of bad luck.
Changes in the system noise is how the process control world detects things like plugged pipes going to pressure gauges, no need to guess if the pressure is not changing because it's steady or because the pipe is plugged.
I work in process control and no, it doesn't. The problem is that the pressure sensor, the transmitter and the receiver all introduce noise themselves. A sensor that physically exists always sends "dynamic" data, and it's unlikely that being subjected to the far rougher conditions in a car helps matters.
How it actually works is that we have multiple sensors and if they disagree, there is a problem. But of course that costs money, so it's only done to critical systems. Apparently customer's biological functions don't count as those to car manufacturers.
Slashdot Mirror
The sanctity which is best exemplified by willingness to declare other people "broken" and thus discardable?
You are wrong. Surprisingly, beating people until they learn that beating people is wrong doesn't actually work.
Why? Once you know who's taking all the stuff, it's a nuisance, not a danger. Just search their house when someone loses something important.
So maybe you should stop planting people who already have problems into crazy-incubators? Because the harvest might be quite bitter.
Christianity? Funny, that reminds me of this guy Jesus who said something about not obsessing about money - in fact you should give it all to the poor to get a treasure in Heaven (funny how bibilical literalists never interpret that part literally). Good thing American Evangelicals are here to set the record right.
Internet cash, actually: a fast and convenient way of making payment from person to person without trusting the sender, recipient or any third parties.
And that's fine. To put it bluntly, money is just paper and gold is just bling. If you never spend your wealth, it's like it didn't exist; from economy's point of view there's no difference between someone who sits on a trillion dollars but only spends what he must to avoid starving to death and someone who barely makes enough to avoid starving to death.
It's not your greenbacks or gold coins that build a factory; it's the people, equipment and raw materials that do it. If Joe McDuck doesn't want to buy them, then all that means is that Joe Glamgold gets them cheaper.
That might be an improvement over the current situation where speculation and outright manipulation disturb said productive activity to the detriment of everyone.
Perhaps. But when a US senator makes a proposal that simultaneously attacks anonymity and attempts to crush a potential competitor against established big business, it's "perhaps" as in "perhaps the guy who was about to testify against don Carnage really accidentally shot himself in the face with a shotgun six times": possible, but hardly the simplest explanation.
I guess making such demands as to keep you from ever appearing in any movie would be an effective way to avoid being in this situation.
My apologies, I thought the fact that you were posting on a Slashdot discussion about city planning implied you had an interest in the subject.
Who asked you to?
Of course not, that would be slavery. Now making doing business with any comer a condition of getting some legal benefit, such as incorporation, on the other hand... Also, in a multi-owner company, it's very questionable whether turning down customers because of their sexuality is legal simply because it's losing shareholders money.
They should had cared because a good portion of that $369 million likely belonged to the people selling their stuff over various Silk Road follow-ups, and at least some of those are bound to be traditional gangsters trying to expand and modernize their business, thus it's entirely possible those externalities are forcibly re-internalized in the form of bullets.
A much more general use of the word currency is anything that is used in any circumstances, as a medium of exchange. In this use, "currency" is a synonym for the concept of money.
Do you have some reason why Bitcoin should be excluded?
What has transpired is a sloppy banker got robbed by a clever thief, and now his customers are buthurt, despite being warned time and again that it's a bad idea to let a total stranger keep their money for them. What does any of this has to do with any property of Bitcoin?
No one. But it is the most efficient way to house people. A society where everyone owns a house and a yard is going to be wasting far more resources to provide the same level of services to those people than one where they live in large apartment buildings.
Is that tradeoff worth it? Maybe. But it is a tradeoff, and leaves less economic output to spend in other areas. And it will only get worse with peak oil and the associated energy crisis.
So if you like suburban living, you'd better hope electric cars and either nuclear or super-efficient solar catch on. That's pretty much the only scenario where it's sustainable.
Thus artificially limiting production and everyone's quality of life. Not good. Just give everyone guaranteed food, shelter, Internet access and hours - and all the resources needed to use them - at a makerbot.
So... is that intended as praise for the marines or to make rather nasty implications about them? Or possibly even as a threat? Because it could be read either way.
Well, life is all about making something good from whatever you have. All editors can't be delicious.
YES. What "mining" actually is is solving transaction blocks (if you want to get technical, finding nonce values that make the block's hash be smaller than the current difficulty) and thus lengthening the blockchain, decreasing the chance that an attacker can replace it after a certain point with an alternate history. You are not "discovering" Bitcoins, you are getting an extra reward on top of transaction fees, both as an incentive and to bootstrap the initial distribution of the coins.
The ability to start a fully automated client and let it work in no way implies any kind of understanding of how Bitcoin operates, any more than starting a computer implies understanding of chip design.
And this is where the analogy breaks down. People who set educational standards don't just impact themselves. They impact the students, their community, every community the children will ever be a part of, the greater communities they're parts of and so on right to the world at large. They aren't just smearing themselves in shit, they're forcibly shitting on children.
Saying "communities should be allowed to set their own standards" is equivalent to saying "community members have no rights".
No, it represents the rather reasonable view that the dime only has value because it can hire someone else, directly (services) or indirectly (products). Making sure that people capable of performing valuable work remain available in the dollar ecosystem is thus necessary to ensure the holder of said currency can cash in the debt implied by the bill. This requires education, and it is only fitting that those who benefit from it take part in paying for it.
If many are, that implies that they have received bad information about their future prospects - for I very much doubt many people want to be poor - and, as such, the schools have failed in their task. This problem needs to be corrected by enchanting the relevant classes.
If your house goes up in a massive explosion a week before you were supposed to testify against a Mafia don, then maybe it was a random gas leak. Maybe. But that's neither the only possible nor even the most credible explanation. And people who point this out might be motivated by factors beyond sympathy for your political opinions.
I disagree. While the description of Assange is obviously untrustworthy, and most likely an attempt at character assasination, it's quite newsworthy that such attempts continue. It paints a frightening picture of not Assange, but the state of our Western democracies.
Also, Slashdot's discussion system means everyone gets to see both the reactions such a story generates, and even more importantly the moderations they receive. It is quite relevant to all of us and the future of our civilization if such sustained effort to destroy the credibility of resistance actually produces results.
None of us knows anything about Assange from credible sources, so everyone is free to believe what they will. Thus what they choose to believe reflects their pre-existing bias, not unlike in the Zimmerman-Martin affair (where people apparently used their crystal balls to come up with ludicrously detailed blow-by-blow descriptions of what obviously must have happened). It matters little if Assange is a scoundrel, a Cape, or a mere human; but it matters a lot whether people are willing to simply take the government's word of it.
Depends. The standard alignment grid uses cartesian coordinates. It's "natural" shape is a square where law-chaos and good-evil axis are separate, and ordinal alignments have a greater magnitude of difference from neutrality. On the other hand, the Great Wheel uses a polar alignment system where the type and magnitude of alignment form the axis, thus chaotic good is both less good than neutral good and less chaotic than chaotic neutral of same magnitude.
True but misleading. What you actually can do at home is confirm Bitcoin transactions, which reinforces transaction history against double-spends. For this service, you receive transaction fees. As an added incentive, you currently also receive newly minted Bitcoins. However, the latter is merely a side effect to help bootstrap the network and provide the initial distribution of coins, and will slowly fade away.
The whole idea of Bitcoins having "intrinsic value" is about the same as claiming miles or newton seconds have an intrinsic value. They are simply arbitrary units of measurement in a distributed ledger system. Bitcoins have no identity, they're simply a unit of magnitude.
No, it's because the market understands what's actually happening. You are simply wrong.
That's usually just called "cost". And "value" is used for how much I'd be willing to pay for it. And for currency, that's not "intrinsic value" but the value of the goods and services I can get with it.
The ideal currency has an intrinsic value and cost of zero.
That's because stocks are investment vehicles, which means their value is mainly based on how much the owner can get by selling them, which in turn depends on how much other people will value them in the future. That tends to lead to cyles of positive and negative reinforcement.
The actors participating in the market, however, are rational. Their timing might be off, but the overall strategy - buy at the bottom and sell at the top of the cycle - is sound. The overall system is broken, but I'm not sure it can be fixed.
You aren't investing in a currency, you're investing in the economy that uses that currency - or, to be exact, the right to acquire some of the products of said economy. So the questions here are: what is the total value of goods, services and whatever payable by a particular currency per unit of said currency? How is that ratio likely to evolve in the future (multiple scenarios and their probabilities)? How does that compare to whatever you'd trade it for?
Also, you should never invest your shorts. You can always have a case of bad luck.
I work in process control and no, it doesn't. The problem is that the pressure sensor, the transmitter and the receiver all introduce noise themselves. A sensor that physically exists always sends "dynamic" data, and it's unlikely that being subjected to the far rougher conditions in a car helps matters.
How it actually works is that we have multiple sensors and if they disagree, there is a problem. But of course that costs money, so it's only done to critical systems. Apparently customer's biological functions don't count as those to car manufacturers.