You also forgot the smoking of teh weed... cuz you know, that's exactly what the 99% need... another place to spend the money they don't have and to magically go someplace in their mind where nothing matters.
Sure, why not? World sucks and probably always will, so people need a break from it every now and then. In practice that can come from weed or alcohol, and weed is a lot less unhealthy.
The availability of relatively safe mind-altering substances is going to be ever more important in the future as energy shortage, climate change and wealth concentration make life worse and traditional escapes - such as traveling - less available. Also, we should invest serious research into things like easy induction of lucid dreaming.
The thing is, drugs are a cheap form of entertainment, both in terms of energy and enviromental impact. And some of them, such as weed, also help people deal with the fact that their lives will suck from cradle to the grave, and their children will be even worse off. We can't afford to overlook these benefits just for ideological reasons.
You need to study up on your Bitcoin protocols some more.
No, because he's not talking about hacking Bitcoin, he's talking about hacking HTTP - specifically forcing all Web traffick to go through a proxy and replacing everything that looks like a Bitcoin address with your own. You know, the good old "forged bill" fraud.
If enough shit hits the fan at once, though, no currency will be valuable unless it has even more intrinsic value than gold. That ammunition you mentioned would be a good candidate. Let's see, the largest unit of currency you'll normally see is the.50 BMG HEAP, then... how many of those to a 20MM?
Ammo is only really only valuable in the special case where the government is strong enough to suppress warlords but not highway bandits, but that kind of government could also issue money. If it's weaker, you'd be crazy to start a gunfight against an army by yourself while if you're member of an army yourself you will have a quartermaster to distribute ammunition, whereas if it's stronger you only need ammo for hunting, which makes it a tool (and you still get purpose-made money).
Interplanetary transactions are a bit harder of a problem to deal with though, because of time delay problems related to the speed of light. Bitcoin mining on Mars seems to be unlikely to happen, although it could present some interesting issues.
The target interval of new blocks needs to be much greater than the round-trip time of the network. If you can live with slow confirmations, this works fine.
Alternatively, the network could be partitioned: allow there be multiple blockchains, possibly with different rules, and a mechanism for trading between these different BitCurrencies within the network itself. For example, if I have 10 EarthCoins, I could send a sell offer accepting a minimum of 5 MarsCoins and an expiration date/block. Should this transaction meet acceptable MarsCoins-to-EarthCoins sell orders, a mining node could match them up into a single transaction when the first one expires, broadcast to both networks, and claim the transaction fees of the participant offering currency in the chain the block belongs to. This setup would allow Martians to mine MarsCoins on Mars, Earthlings to mine Earthcoins on Earth, and crazy inflationary guys to mine AsymptoticallyNearingWorthlessCoins on their villainous lairs, and all to trade with each other.
The details need to be worked on by people smarter than me (at the very least there must be rules on how transactions are paired off to prevent different chains form forming different ones), but the basic idea - having not one BitCoin, but several BitCurrencies and an ability to trade between them in the BitCoin network itself - would solve not only the latency problem, but also the endless debates about the deflationary vs. inflationary currencies and other potential BitCoin tweaks: let them all compete and see how it plays out.
Heck, a normal bank or a government could issue its own FiatCoin currency (mining reward goes to 0 after the original block, which generates a zillion coins in its coinbase) and see how it goes.
Value does not come from scarcity only. There is not much "authentic betterunixthenunix urine" in the world, but I doubt that you would give me anything more than your own urine in exchange for it.
What I think what religious people don't get is that the non-religious people don't care what Einstein's views on religious were, because they don't need constant confirmation of their beliefs.
But the people who make a big deal out of their Atheism with Capital A do, which people who make a big deal of their Theism with Capital T recognize because they see their mirror image, thus Einstein quotes and interpretations fly back and forth like machine gun fire where ever these two fight.
And that rises interesting question: should future archeologists uncover a few scrambled pieces of this thread 10,000 years from now while examining the early Internet culture, would they conclude that Einstein was a prophet or a pagan god of some kind? Would they speculate that the early physicist was named after this obscure mythical being? And would opening the Archive of 4chan melt their faces off ?-)
Seriously, if there is nothing to religion, why do people fight so hard against it?
While that's an interesting question, it's not the case here. The case is someone pushing his religion to other people and going to the courts when those other people tell him to leave them alone.
Why not allow it to be called a Christmas party?
There is a difference between being allowed to call a "holiday party" a "Christmas party" and getting it officially renamed as such.
Why can't he voice his opinions on gay marriage? Everybody for gay marriage is allowed to share their opinions.
Because it's a workplace, not a public forum, and the people working there should be allowed to do so in peace without having to listen to clumsy propaganda which crosses into personal attack for any gays that might be working there.
Of course he shouldn't have been combative. That's just stupid too. But God forbid anybody but a Muslim become combative. (Then we all have to apologize to them).
Are you longing for a theocracy here, or was it just a random non-sequiter?
A private sale of a used product should not be a tax event ( which is what is mostly happening today with anonymous currency ). It doesn't matter what i bought or sold, I dont want my transactions 'officially recorded' its no ones business other than mine and the seller/buyer.
But your transactions must be publically recorded, otherwise the seller can't prove that he now owns the money the buyer sent him and the buyer can't prove he hasn't already spent the money he's using to make the purchase. You can both be pseudonymous, but the transaction itself must be made public.
The whole Bitcoin scheme is really just a distributed accounting database system. Until a transaction has been recorded in it, and preferably confirmed several times, it hasn't happened.
Who gives a fuck if a job is lost? I have no problem replacing men with machines. A competent man will find a new way to sustain himself without relying on holding back progress.
I think considering a superhero fantasy a valid answer to economic problem explains quite a bit about the current state of the economy. Or should that be a supervillain - that bit about replacing men with machines certainly sounded ominous...
That's a good thing. Any job that can be eliminated through technological advancement makes people available for more important work.
All of which completely ignores the time and resource cost of the training required for that more important work, the fact that not everyone can do every job with any amount of training, and most importantly that people aren't spare parts that sit on a low-rent warehouse waiting for their next assignment between jobs, but fairly high-maintenance living creatures. Thus the end result is not more efficient division of labour for the betterment of all, the end result is fairytale riches for some and poverty and uncertainty for most. Which is not a good thing, no matter how many rich megalomaniacs complain they aren't getting enough worship from their slaves.
Then again, if there's any group that deserves to be on the losing side of this dog-eat-dog battle, it's bankers.
I was referring to the Broken window fallacy, which could completely remove unemployment, if vandals decided to cooperate. The amount of time and effort wasted with banks and their red tape is pretty similar to that.
The problem is, Broken Window Fallacy is only a fallacy in the sense that an economy which has to use lots of resources to deal with vandalism is less well of than an otherwise identical economy which instead uses these resource to expand. It says absolutely nothing about whether a statement like "our economy would collapse if vandalism stopped all of a sudden because a lot of glassmakers would be out of work" is true.
Destruction or busywork may not create prosperity, but they can be used to spread it around; and while a more rational way might be to simply pay the unemployed glassmakers social security benefits and retrain them, that solution seems to strike those better off as unfair, so that leaves either letting them starve - which will lead to a revolution eventually - or making enough busywork through bureaucracy or breaking windows to ensure near-full employment and simply accept the resulting waste as a price to pay for people's irrationality.
Good luck trying to coerce me using a flying spaghetti monster walking over waters that restrains acting till the day after my death.
This has been done numerous times in human history. It stops being funny by the time enough emotionally fragile people have been coerced through intimidation that they, in turn, can coerce you through voting or just plain violence.
Just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean it can't kill you.
For example: if you turn off your air conditioning while you are away from the house, at work, then you will save about half your electric bill.
Must be fun living in the equator.
If you turn off ALL the lights in your house before you leave you will reduce even more. Imagine now that you turn off your refrigerator while you are gone, your hot water heater, your television and your meter stops completely for 1/3 or more of the day. Now you have some real savings.
And your food spoils and you have no hot water when you get home. I guess you could live on canned food and only take cold showers, but then why bother with a refrigerator or a water heater in the first place when they won't be benefiting you any?
No idea why anyone would leave television or lights on in an empty house. Are you trying to take an excessively wasteful lifestyle as a starting point so you can then claim huge savings?
This is not possible, you might say,
No, just pretty transparent strawman argument trying to pretend that most of the electricity used in first world countries is used to air-condition and light empty houses.
but after living in poor areas of Asia (southwest China and north Thailand) I can tell you it is how most middle class people there already live.
So you agree, then, that conserving significant amounts of energy requires a third-world lifestyle?
"I would never do that!" "it is so inconvenient" you might say. I think you are a fool, paying 20, 30, 100, 200 dollars a month for your effin' convenience? really, i should say your convenience and your health and your economy because all the above is what you are paying with. And mine too, in case you wonder why I might care.
I say you are either a liar or a fool, or most likely both. You call my conclusions bullshit, then come up with a ridiculous strawman to back you up, then actually agree with those conclusions, then finish with a non-sequiter.
It is you who are a threat to health, economy and convenience of your fellow people, and your own too.
I suspect that, if regulators attempt to get their hands on it somehow it will consider those attempts to be damage and, like the Internet, route around them.
Bitcoin has two problems: the size of the network and the fact that there is a network.
The size of the network is a problem because an attacker with more computing power than the rest of the network combined can subvert Bitcoin. At the current size, it's plausible that a government might be able to do this. This is also a problem with any future decentralized currencies: until they're big enough they are vulnerable, and getting big requires drawing attention - which will include that of malefactors. This will always be a problem with proof-of-work based systems.
The fact that there is a network is a problem because it means a government can find out who runs Bitcoin software, thus making it possible to ban it. This might be worked around by routing network connections through Tor, however it makes it difficult for merchants to accept Bitcoin.
If you were raised believing such things, it will be very difficult to shake, particularly if you have a conformist streak (i.e., most people, but not most people on slashdot).
War is not murder. The best warriors do not hate their enemy -- Spartans for example.
Assassins don't hate their targets either. They're still murderers. Hatred is utterly irrelevant for whether some particular life-taking was murder or not.
Abortion is very definitely murder; why didn't you address that?
No. Killing a fetus means you pay damages to the mother.
We are supposed to give to the poor and share what we have with others. Letting the government take it at gunpoint and "redistribute" it is not Christian charity. That's just plain lunacy and never works.
The chapter and verse where the evils of setting up a government program to provide for the poor so they are not dependent on the fickle mercy of strangers for their everyday bread is discussed seems to have slipped my mind. Or it could be because I'm a fool who thinks the poor are real people who need to eat too, rather than mere stage props for the rich to show off their personal piety with, and am misunderstanding the purpose of charity as a result.
The rest of your drivel could be summed up by "ye shall know them by their fruits". That's wise. Don't listen to what a man says; look at what he actually does. Obama (and most Democrats) fails on this one. A Democrat always says one thing and does another. For example -- they always want to "help" the poor, but they don't want the poor to get any richer. They need an uneducated lower class for them to stay in power.
Here's a little piece of wisdom: whether Democrats act according to Christian values is utterly unrelated to whether Republicans do. More generally, you can't refute "Republicans suck" with "Democracts suck too", because it's entirely possible that they both suck donkey balls, and in fact are Biblically pretty much guaranteed to do so because they're both made of mere mortals. The question - at least in a two-party system like the USA - is which one sucks less.
On the other hand, "Do what I say or my friend Dubba will patiently wait till you die and then he will beat your death body" is not coercive... not for me, at least.
Quite a few firebrand sermons leave out the patient waiting. In fact, they tend to try to make it sound more like Dubba is lifting the axe behind the listener right now!!! And while it's fine to say that this should utterly ineffective against anyone who doesn't think Dubba exists, they certainly attempt to make the threat seem real, and as such are trying to coerce.
Of course, most firebrand sermons also make their God sound like a superpowered Hitler, but that's another discussion.
Because everything government does and could possibly do is founded on coercion (meaning violence or threat of violence).
Yeah. When the local government re-paved the road where I live, they preceded that by playing the sound of breaking kneecaps at 140 decibels all night long, just so we all understood how futile it would be to resist fixing our infrastructure. Every time I drive to work and my shock absorbers don't break I can almost feel the boot stomping on my face. Oh the humanity!
The real problem is people who think reactors are the only solution to global warming. Hint: Japan has just demonstrated how far energy efficiency alone can go, getting through the summer peak periods without any black/brownouts at all.
And they accomplished this by turning off anything that uses electricity. Which might be something people put up with short-term at peak hysteria, but is not a viable solution long-term. Calling it "energy efficiency" is also highly misleading, as efficiency implies that you got the same result for less energy used, which wasn't the case.
It's your kind of attitude that makes, say, Greenpeace a hindrance to enviromental conservation: the delusion that it's okay to lie for an ideological point.
Here's a hint, the "god doesn't exist, so we can do what we want" argument doesn't work.
More to the point, "we can do what we want" doesn't imply "we should randomly kill people". Which is a good thing, because whether or not God/god/gods exist(s), we most certainly can kill people. This has been tested numerous times in human history and proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Like my tenant, I went over 1000 times over the last 10 years how to burn a CD. He still calls me when he wants to burn a CD. I explained to him the best course of action after this long is to stop trying. He agreed because it's just too complicated and he is not a "computer guy" like me.
I just hope stupidity is not contagious.
Do you still burn his CDs for him? Yes?
Don't confuse opportunistic laziness with stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, why not? World sucks and probably always will, so people need a break from it every now and then. In practice that can come from weed or alcohol, and weed is a lot less unhealthy.
The availability of relatively safe mind-altering substances is going to be ever more important in the future as energy shortage, climate change and wealth concentration make life worse and traditional escapes - such as traveling - less available. Also, we should invest serious research into things like easy induction of lucid dreaming.
The thing is, drugs are a cheap form of entertainment, both in terms of energy and enviromental impact. And some of them, such as weed, also help people deal with the fact that their lives will suck from cradle to the grave, and their children will be even worse off. We can't afford to overlook these benefits just for ideological reasons.
To be fair, in Linux drivers are part of the kernel while in Windows they're separate, so in Linux driver problems are kernel (Linux) problems.
Fixed that for you.
No, because he's not talking about hacking Bitcoin, he's talking about hacking HTTP - specifically forcing all Web traffick to go through a proxy and replacing everything that looks like a Bitcoin address with your own. You know, the good old "forged bill" fraud.
Ammo is only really only valuable in the special case where the government is strong enough to suppress warlords but not highway bandits, but that kind of government could also issue money. If it's weaker, you'd be crazy to start a gunfight against an army by yourself while if you're member of an army yourself you will have a quartermaster to distribute ammunition, whereas if it's stronger you only need ammo for hunting, which makes it a tool (and you still get purpose-made money).
The target interval of new blocks needs to be much greater than the round-trip time of the network. If you can live with slow confirmations, this works fine.
Alternatively, the network could be partitioned: allow there be multiple blockchains, possibly with different rules, and a mechanism for trading between these different BitCurrencies within the network itself. For example, if I have 10 EarthCoins, I could send a sell offer accepting a minimum of 5 MarsCoins and an expiration date/block. Should this transaction meet acceptable MarsCoins-to-EarthCoins sell orders, a mining node could match them up into a single transaction when the first one expires, broadcast to both networks, and claim the transaction fees of the participant offering currency in the chain the block belongs to. This setup would allow Martians to mine MarsCoins on Mars, Earthlings to mine Earthcoins on Earth, and crazy inflationary guys to mine AsymptoticallyNearingWorthlessCoins on their villainous lairs, and all to trade with each other.
The details need to be worked on by people smarter than me (at the very least there must be rules on how transactions are paired off to prevent different chains form forming different ones), but the basic idea - having not one BitCoin, but several BitCurrencies and an ability to trade between them in the BitCoin network itself - would solve not only the latency problem, but also the endless debates about the deflationary vs. inflationary currencies and other potential BitCoin tweaks: let them all compete and see how it plays out.
Heck, a normal bank or a government could issue its own FiatCoin currency (mining reward goes to 0 after the original block, which generates a zillion coins in its coinbase) and see how it goes.
Bad example.
The scientific method doesn't prevent anyone from reaching wrong conclusions, it just means they'll probably get eventually corrected.
But the people who make a big deal out of their Atheism with Capital A do, which people who make a big deal of their Theism with Capital T recognize because they see their mirror image, thus Einstein quotes and interpretations fly back and forth like machine gun fire where ever these two fight.
And that rises interesting question: should future archeologists uncover a few scrambled pieces of this thread 10,000 years from now while examining the early Internet culture, would they conclude that Einstein was a prophet or a pagan god of some kind? Would they speculate that the early physicist was named after this obscure mythical being? And would opening the Archive of 4chan melt their faces off ?-)
While that's an interesting question, it's not the case here. The case is someone pushing his religion to other people and going to the courts when those other people tell him to leave them alone.
There is a difference between being allowed to call a "holiday party" a "Christmas party" and getting it officially renamed as such.
Because it's a workplace, not a public forum, and the people working there should be allowed to do so in peace without having to listen to clumsy propaganda which crosses into personal attack for any gays that might be working there.
Are you longing for a theocracy here, or was it just a random non-sequiter?
But your transactions must be publically recorded, otherwise the seller can't prove that he now owns the money the buyer sent him and the buyer can't prove he hasn't already spent the money he's using to make the purchase. You can both be pseudonymous, but the transaction itself must be made public.
The whole Bitcoin scheme is really just a distributed accounting database system. Until a transaction has been recorded in it, and preferably confirmed several times, it hasn't happened.
I think considering a superhero fantasy a valid answer to economic problem explains quite a bit about the current state of the economy. Or should that be a supervillain - that bit about replacing men with machines certainly sounded ominous...
All of which completely ignores the time and resource cost of the training required for that more important work, the fact that not everyone can do every job with any amount of training, and most importantly that people aren't spare parts that sit on a low-rent warehouse waiting for their next assignment between jobs, but fairly high-maintenance living creatures. Thus the end result is not more efficient division of labour for the betterment of all, the end result is fairytale riches for some and poverty and uncertainty for most. Which is not a good thing, no matter how many rich megalomaniacs complain they aren't getting enough worship from their slaves.
Then again, if there's any group that deserves to be on the losing side of this dog-eat-dog battle, it's bankers.
The problem is, Broken Window Fallacy is only a fallacy in the sense that an economy which has to use lots of resources to deal with vandalism is less well of than an otherwise identical economy which instead uses these resource to expand. It says absolutely nothing about whether a statement like "our economy would collapse if vandalism stopped all of a sudden because a lot of glassmakers would be out of work" is true.
Destruction or busywork may not create prosperity, but they can be used to spread it around; and while a more rational way might be to simply pay the unemployed glassmakers social security benefits and retrain them, that solution seems to strike those better off as unfair, so that leaves either letting them starve - which will lead to a revolution eventually - or making enough busywork through bureaucracy or breaking windows to ensure near-full employment and simply accept the resulting waste as a price to pay for people's irrationality.
This has been done numerous times in human history. It stops being funny by the time enough emotionally fragile people have been coerced through intimidation that they, in turn, can coerce you through voting or just plain violence.
Just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean it can't kill you.
Well, as detailed below, you failed.
Must be fun living in the equator.
And your food spoils and you have no hot water when you get home. I guess you could live on canned food and only take cold showers, but then why bother with a refrigerator or a water heater in the first place when they won't be benefiting you any?
No idea why anyone would leave television or lights on in an empty house. Are you trying to take an excessively wasteful lifestyle as a starting point so you can then claim huge savings?
No, just pretty transparent strawman argument trying to pretend that most of the electricity used in first world countries is used to air-condition and light empty houses.
So you agree, then, that conserving significant amounts of energy requires a third-world lifestyle?
I say you are either a liar or a fool, or most likely both. You call my conclusions bullshit, then come up with a ridiculous strawman to back you up, then actually agree with those conclusions, then finish with a non-sequiter.
It is you who are a threat to health, economy and convenience of your fellow people, and your own too.
Bitcoin has two problems: the size of the network and the fact that there is a network.
The size of the network is a problem because an attacker with more computing power than the rest of the network combined can subvert Bitcoin. At the current size, it's plausible that a government might be able to do this. This is also a problem with any future decentralized currencies: until they're big enough they are vulnerable, and getting big requires drawing attention - which will include that of malefactors. This will always be a problem with proof-of-work based systems.
The fact that there is a network is a problem because it means a government can find out who runs Bitcoin software, thus making it possible to ban it. This might be worked around by routing network connections through Tor, however it makes it difficult for merchants to accept Bitcoin.
Yeah, we're all individuals.
Assassins don't hate their targets either. They're still murderers. Hatred is utterly irrelevant for whether some particular life-taking was murder or not.
It is, however, forbidden.
Perhaps. However, Jesus did not use it even when it was required by law, so it should be highly suspect to a Christian, at the very least. Unless a particular Christian thinks he's holier than Christ, of course.
No. Killing a fetus means you pay damages to the mother.
The chapter and verse where the evils of setting up a government program to provide for the poor so they are not dependent on the fickle mercy of strangers for their everyday bread is discussed seems to have slipped my mind. Or it could be because I'm a fool who thinks the poor are real people who need to eat too, rather than mere stage props for the rich to show off their personal piety with, and am misunderstanding the purpose of charity as a result.
Here's a little piece of wisdom: whether Democrats act according to Christian values is utterly unrelated to whether Republicans do. More generally, you can't refute "Republicans suck" with "Democracts suck too", because it's entirely possible that they both suck donkey balls, and in fact are Biblically pretty much guaranteed to do so because they're both made of mere mortals. The question - at least in a two-party system like the USA - is which one sucks less.
Quite a few firebrand sermons leave out the patient waiting. In fact, they tend to try to make it sound more like Dubba is lifting the axe behind the listener right now!!! And while it's fine to say that this should utterly ineffective against anyone who doesn't think Dubba exists, they certainly attempt to make the threat seem real, and as such are trying to coerce.
Of course, most firebrand sermons also make their God sound like a superpowered Hitler, but that's another discussion.
Yeah. When the local government re-paved the road where I live, they preceded that by playing the sound of breaking kneecaps at 140 decibels all night long, just so we all understood how futile it would be to resist fixing our infrastructure. Every time I drive to work and my shock absorbers don't break I can almost feel the boot stomping on my face. Oh the humanity!
And they accomplished this by turning off anything that uses electricity. Which might be something people put up with short-term at peak hysteria, but is not a viable solution long-term. Calling it "energy efficiency" is also highly misleading, as efficiency implies that you got the same result for less energy used, which wasn't the case.
It's your kind of attitude that makes, say, Greenpeace a hindrance to enviromental conservation: the delusion that it's okay to lie for an ideological point.
More to the point, "we can do what we want" doesn't imply "we should randomly kill people". Which is a good thing, because whether or not God/god/gods exist(s), we most certainly can kill people. This has been tested numerous times in human history and proven beyond reasonable doubt.
One sure mark of a fundamentalist is demanding a literally impossible standard of evidence from the people he disagrees with, and only them.
Do you still burn his CDs for him? Yes?
Don't confuse opportunistic laziness with stupidity.