I can decide that I refuse to accept any BC if it has a certain known-evil transaction in its blockchain history. Yes, this will require me to do a lot of work before accepting any transaction, but in principle, I could do it.
No, you couldn't, because a transaction can and often does have multiple inputs from different past transactions and multiple outputs into future ones. Your "evil" transaction will eventually be in the history of most if not all of the unspent outputs.
Bitcoins don't have identity. A Bitcoin is a unit of magnitude for use in accounting, not a dollar bill with a serial number.
Tax money is not yours, it's a payment for partaking in civilization which, after all, requires a lot of human effort to upkeep.
I think this is the problem with most libertarians: you've been surrounded by the invisible support systems of society all your life, so you mistake them for something that occurs naturally, like sunlight. Thus when you're required to pull your weight and help maintain these systems, you see this as an egregious violation of your property rights, completely oblivious to the fact that property is an artificial construct built and maintained by them in the first place. And everyone else, of course, sees a freeloader who's arrogant enough to be insulted by the very idea of having to chip in.
The world does not owe you unpaid servitude. You will never get things like property rights or a monetary system without having to pay for them. Nor can you pay only for things that directly benefit you, because that leads to a tragedy of the commons where everyone argues why someone else should pay for every single system and the end result is that no one pays for anything, and society collapses.
I doubt that you'll stop playing a victim because you've been told polish some of the tiles on the streets of gold you walk on every now and then, but this is why you aren't being taken seriously outside the lunatic fringe.
The average member of the public has an emotional, visceral reaction to things such as GMO, global warming, nuclear power, et cetera. You might as well be talking about abortion, because Joe Sixpack doesn't understand things like nuclear physics, cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis, et cetera.
Joe Sixpack understands cost-benefit analysis perfectly fine. Specifically, he understands that his opinion on nuclear power - or anything else, really - is extremely unlikely to have any noticeable effect, while research has a definite cost. For the same reason spouting an uninformed opinion is unlikely to have a significant cost, while it can have a noticeable benefit in the form of reinforcing identity or letting you feel you're fighting the good fight.
When a falling object hits the ground and stops moving, if I am not mistaken the momentum is converted to waste heat.
You are mistaken. Energy is converted to waste heat (which is a form of energy, so total energy is unchanged). Momentum is unchanged - some of it is simply transferred to Earth.
Conservation of momentum is just as fundamental a principle as conservation of energy. That doesn't mean that a drive that requires no fuel is impossible - because you can convert energy to matter - it just means that it has to dump the counterforce somewhere to keep momentum accounts balanced.
You know, the same people that won't fund NASA but can waste money trying to figure out if you are a sociopath by your tweets (and that's not the worst waste of science funding, just an easy target).
But think of all the untapped political and economic talent this program could find!
You do know that sort of obsessive language-lawyering is exactly what turns people off to exploring C, right?
Obsessive attention to details is the essence of programming in a non-managed language. People are simply drawing the completely correct conclusion that the gain is not worth the pain in most cases.
No the dirty secret is when IT people are young we are all naive, idealistic Libertarians who couldn't fathom the idea that Labor might need protection from Capital when the Free Market can clearly fix all ills if only the government would get out of the way.
Or, more cynically, everyone thinks they're better than average, so they don't want a union cramping their style. One might say the result is laser-guided karma giving them exactly what they said those "weaker" programmers deserved: low wage, bad working conditions and no job security.
Eventually, at some point, us plebians have to get fed up with it right? I mean, we just MUST have a breaking point, right?
And then what? Revolution? You know how that'll end - meet the new boss, the same as the old boss. It's because the new boss what taught what it means to be a boss by the old boss. Just like LinkedIn's leadership was taught that making money is the most valuable thing, and just like the slap on the wrist they received as a nominal punishment confirms that they have indeed correctly discerned and internalized society's values, so their only real crime was getting caught.
People's internalized value systems and patterns of behaviour interpret information and suggest actions just like inherent biological instincts do. Acting out these impulses then demonstrates these models to any onlookers, who'll eventually internalize them in turn. Abused people often become abusers, because they have the model and only need to switch roles. Similarly, current world culture has as a central model constant abuse of the weak by the powerful, and has been for who knows how many millenia. It's so endemic it's become more or less synonymous with "human nature", and keeps on being imprinted on every new generation, even in nominally free societies.
So no, us plebeians reaching our breaking point wouldn't change anything. The basic assumptions on the system are inside us - specifically that some people are plebeian and some patrician - so we'd simply rebuild it with some role reassignments. The only way to break free is to recognize these internalized diseased structures in yourself, systematically eradicate them by ignoring their promptings so they fade away, and let your new behaviour re-socialize the people around you by contradicting their internalized systems of abuse. But of course, that means giving up the quest for money and power, and simultaneously making yourself the mortal enemy of an entire world culture built on a fundamentally insane basis, so historically such quests have ended very, very badly.
Given our success in the "War on Drugs", we should declare war on prosperity.
Unfortuntely, that was one war the Powers That Be actually wanted to win, rather than keep going in perpetuity, so they did. After all, prosperous people are hard to control, since they can afford to think beyond mere survival.
Specifically, the purpose is to ensure you're as equal before the law as the contents of your wallet allow. Unless you pissed off someone more powerful, of course, in which case they will be confiscated.
You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it.
Of course, this ignores the reaction of onlookers, who are given a clear message that they're worth nothing to their society, and as such don't owe it anything either. I wonder if a nation facing such a problem might turn to exaggerated forms of patriotism as a desperate attempt to win loyalty where none is deserved, such as making little kids swear their allegiance every morning?
Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Free market doesn't really seem to work anywhere anymore, seeing how economy is always in a crisis, unemployment has apparently become permanent fixture of it and even employed people can't afford the lifestyle of their parents without getting into debt.
This man either has no real vision, or he's very bad at communicating a clear vision.
He has no idea what to do. Mass layoffs make it pretty much impossible to launch new products (since who will develop them) or do any other major moves (since those always cause inefficiency before people adapt). Assuming he's not a complete idiot, he doesn't see Microsoft to be doing either in near future, then, and is trying to optimize the current situation by cutting costs.
In other words, as far as Nadella is concerned Microsoft has become a has-been, and he's adapting the company to make as much profits as possible from its legacy on its way out.
The problem is that when you run a newspaper, you don't run the newspaper - the advertisers are your gods and masters, and you have no say in the matter.
Which of course makes the newspaper worthless to readers, who'll turn to online sources out of necessity. Let's face it: the industry is obsolete.
You have to specifically DO something to test your claim and NOT do other things for control for it to be an experiment.
But in that case the word "experiment" has been defined so narrowly it's no longer the sole validator of scientific theory. For example, General Relativity predicted that light would be affected by Sun's gravitational field, which was later observed during a solar eclipse, which is a naturally occurring event.
How so? You don't even need a computer. Just make it so the train doesn't move if the doors aren't closed, the doors move with little force, and if they fail to close they re-open and try again in 5 seconds.
... and probably a thousand other tasks that is done by a human. Reacting to fault conditions for instance (very hard)
If anything is outside its normal parameters, hit the brakes, cut the power, and send an alarm.
Perhaps the problem of speech recognition is that we try to teach computers our language.
AFAIK the problem of speech recognition is that a human can use the context to guesstimate what a garbled message might have meant, but a computer can't since it doesn't have a model about the subject. It would take a fully sapient computer to reach human-level speech recognition.
If one really enjoys the work one will not treat the work as _work_, but rather something that is FUN - - EXCITING - - REJUVENATING
But it's not. An exhausting activity doesn't become any less exhausting just because you enjoy it. You need downtime for maintenance, no matter how much you might not want it.
I have been in the tech field for decades and I keep seeing people who take the task they are assigned with as challenges that they want to overcome getting the job done faster, with more zeal, and produce much better code than those who take whatever they are being tasked with as "burden"
From office politics to micromanagement to inane performance metrics to managers who make it perfectly clear that they see themselves as feudal lords running their little fiefdoms for the enlargement of their egos and couldn't care less about efficiency, a modern workplace is set up precisely in such a way as to discourage professional pride and encourage cynical resignation. That's not particularly surprising, since the people who designed it had no better models of organization to draw from than said feudal fiefdoms, which were not set up for efficiency but for suppressing peasants by crushing their spirits.
Some people can shrug off the lingering stink of dung ages and excel, some can't. But something is very wrong when it takes an exceptional person just to not view your primary means of accomplishing something as soul-crushing drudgery. Most jobs aren't inherently that bad, and most people aren't really content to merely consume. Even places like 4chan spin around creativity, crude as it might be. So why does the average peon dream of winning it big and forever escaping the need to work for a living?
Hierarchy has been the primary source of inefficiency everywhere I've ever worked. But how to design an organization that can coordinate itself without hierarchy, especially given that it's made of humans used to playing games of master and servant rather than cooperating for common goals? Now that is the trillion-dollar question.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you couldn't, because a transaction can and often does have multiple inputs from different past transactions and multiple outputs into future ones. Your "evil" transaction will eventually be in the history of most if not all of the unspent outputs.
Bitcoins don't have identity. A Bitcoin is a unit of magnitude for use in accounting, not a dollar bill with a serial number.
Tax money is not yours, it's a payment for partaking in civilization which, after all, requires a lot of human effort to upkeep.
I think this is the problem with most libertarians: you've been surrounded by the invisible support systems of society all your life, so you mistake them for something that occurs naturally, like sunlight. Thus when you're required to pull your weight and help maintain these systems, you see this as an egregious violation of your property rights, completely oblivious to the fact that property is an artificial construct built and maintained by them in the first place. And everyone else, of course, sees a freeloader who's arrogant enough to be insulted by the very idea of having to chip in.
The world does not owe you unpaid servitude. You will never get things like property rights or a monetary system without having to pay for them. Nor can you pay only for things that directly benefit you, because that leads to a tragedy of the commons where everyone argues why someone else should pay for every single system and the end result is that no one pays for anything, and society collapses.
I doubt that you'll stop playing a victim because you've been told polish some of the tiles on the streets of gold you walk on every now and then, but this is why you aren't being taken seriously outside the lunatic fringe.
Joe Sixpack understands cost-benefit analysis perfectly fine. Specifically, he understands that his opinion on nuclear power - or anything else, really - is extremely unlikely to have any noticeable effect, while research has a definite cost. For the same reason spouting an uninformed opinion is unlikely to have a significant cost, while it can have a noticeable benefit in the form of reinforcing identity or letting you feel you're fighting the good fight.
It's just our old friend Tragedy of the Commons.
If it dissolves in water, it'll disperse due to entropy, if it doesn't, it'll fall to seabed and get buried by sediment.
"More likely"... on what basis?
And, as all of human history proves, those are more than enough.
You are mistaken. Energy is converted to waste heat (which is a form of energy, so total energy is unchanged). Momentum is unchanged - some of it is simply transferred to Earth.
Conservation of momentum is just as fundamental a principle as conservation of energy. That doesn't mean that a drive that requires no fuel is impossible - because you can convert energy to matter - it just means that it has to dump the counterforce somewhere to keep momentum accounts balanced.
But think of all the untapped political and economic talent this program could find!
A miserable little pile of pixels.
Obsessive attention to details is the essence of programming in a non-managed language. People are simply drawing the completely correct conclusion that the gain is not worth the pain in most cases.
Or, more cynically, everyone thinks they're better than average, so they don't want a union cramping their style. One might say the result is laser-guided karma giving them exactly what they said those "weaker" programmers deserved: low wage, bad working conditions and no job security.
And then what? Revolution? You know how that'll end - meet the new boss, the same as the old boss. It's because the new boss what taught what it means to be a boss by the old boss. Just like LinkedIn's leadership was taught that making money is the most valuable thing, and just like the slap on the wrist they received as a nominal punishment confirms that they have indeed correctly discerned and internalized society's values, so their only real crime was getting caught.
People's internalized value systems and patterns of behaviour interpret information and suggest actions just like inherent biological instincts do. Acting out these impulses then demonstrates these models to any onlookers, who'll eventually internalize them in turn. Abused people often become abusers, because they have the model and only need to switch roles. Similarly, current world culture has as a central model constant abuse of the weak by the powerful, and has been for who knows how many millenia. It's so endemic it's become more or less synonymous with "human nature", and keeps on being imprinted on every new generation, even in nominally free societies.
So no, us plebeians reaching our breaking point wouldn't change anything. The basic assumptions on the system are inside us - specifically that some people are plebeian and some patrician - so we'd simply rebuild it with some role reassignments. The only way to break free is to recognize these internalized diseased structures in yourself, systematically eradicate them by ignoring their promptings so they fade away, and let your new behaviour re-socialize the people around you by contradicting their internalized systems of abuse. But of course, that means giving up the quest for money and power, and simultaneously making yourself the mortal enemy of an entire world culture built on a fundamentally insane basis, so historically such quests have ended very, very badly.
Unfortuntely, that was one war the Powers That Be actually wanted to win, rather than keep going in perpetuity, so they did. After all, prosperous people are hard to control, since they can afford to think beyond mere survival.
Specifically, the purpose is to ensure you're as equal before the law as the contents of your wallet allow. Unless you pissed off someone more powerful, of course, in which case they will be confiscated.
Of course, this ignores the reaction of onlookers, who are given a clear message that they're worth nothing to their society, and as such don't owe it anything either. I wonder if a nation facing such a problem might turn to exaggerated forms of patriotism as a desperate attempt to win loyalty where none is deserved, such as making little kids swear their allegiance every morning?
Free market doesn't really seem to work anywhere anymore, seeing how economy is always in a crisis, unemployment has apparently become permanent fixture of it and even employed people can't afford the lifestyle of their parents without getting into debt.
People are too busy explaining how they can lift more than the robo-suit. Dunno when Slashdot became a high school.
He has no idea what to do. Mass layoffs make it pretty much impossible to launch new products (since who will develop them) or do any other major moves (since those always cause inefficiency before people adapt). Assuming he's not a complete idiot, he doesn't see Microsoft to be doing either in near future, then, and is trying to optimize the current situation by cutting costs.
In other words, as far as Nadella is concerned Microsoft has become a has-been, and he's adapting the company to make as much profits as possible from its legacy on its way out.
Which of course makes the newspaper worthless to readers, who'll turn to online sources out of necessity. Let's face it: the industry is obsolete.
Doesn't matter. That there are unethical lying manipulative bastards is sufficient to cast doubt on evidence that could have been tampered with.
Also, you should seek help for whatever personal issues you're projecting here.
*Nuclear missiles*
*Winter feeding*
Welcome to the age of mammals, dude.
But in that case the word "experiment" has been defined so narrowly it's no longer the sole validator of scientific theory. For example, General Relativity predicted that light would be affected by Sun's gravitational field, which was later observed during a solar eclipse, which is a naturally occurring event.
"Ancient skulls show testosterone levels in humans fell around the time civilization rose".
And this should affect regulations... why?
How so? You don't even need a computer. Just make it so the train doesn't move if the doors aren't closed, the doors move with little force, and if they fail to close they re-open and try again in 5 seconds.
If anything is outside its normal parameters, hit the brakes, cut the power, and send an alarm.
Human drivers can't really do much else, either.
AFAIK the problem of speech recognition is that a human can use the context to guesstimate what a garbled message might have meant, but a computer can't since it doesn't have a model about the subject. It would take a fully sapient computer to reach human-level speech recognition.
But it's not. An exhausting activity doesn't become any less exhausting just because you enjoy it. You need downtime for maintenance, no matter how much you might not want it.
From office politics to micromanagement to inane performance metrics to managers who make it perfectly clear that they see themselves as feudal lords running their little fiefdoms for the enlargement of their egos and couldn't care less about efficiency, a modern workplace is set up precisely in such a way as to discourage professional pride and encourage cynical resignation. That's not particularly surprising, since the people who designed it had no better models of organization to draw from than said feudal fiefdoms, which were not set up for efficiency but for suppressing peasants by crushing their spirits.
Some people can shrug off the lingering stink of dung ages and excel, some can't. But something is very wrong when it takes an exceptional person just to not view your primary means of accomplishing something as soul-crushing drudgery. Most jobs aren't inherently that bad, and most people aren't really content to merely consume. Even places like 4chan spin around creativity, crude as it might be. So why does the average peon dream of winning it big and forever escaping the need to work for a living?
Hierarchy has been the primary source of inefficiency everywhere I've ever worked. But how to design an organization that can coordinate itself without hierarchy, especially given that it's made of humans used to playing games of master and servant rather than cooperating for common goals? Now that is the trillion-dollar question.