This doesn't effect Kickstarter. The SEC only cares about crowd funded securities. I don't know of any kickstarter campaigns that gave stock as a reward.
Equity (=shares) is only one kind of security (otherwise they wouldn't have so many terms!). In a Kickstarter campaign, you give money for something that doesn't exist, establishing a debt. Does that debt qualify as a debt security? Probably not, as securities are by definition tradable, and there is no explicit mechanism in Kickstarter for the trading of debt -- you can promise your reward to someone else, but the obligation to fulfill rests with you and the third party has no direct involvement with the Kickstarter project.
However, the big motivating factor behind this law isn't the current Kickstarter style of crowdfunding, but the soon-to-exist tradeable-stocks-and-shares type of crowdfunding. It will shortly be legal in the US to sell small equity shares to the public after a long period where such "penny stock" was illegal (due to high levels of fraud) and therefore the SEC have to make regulations to protect the public from conmen.
If you want to use non-US crowdfunding, you're going to need a non-US company, and you may well end up relying on non-US backers, because different countries have different regulations about offshore investment.
Because while it may not be "traded" crowdfunding is still dealing with the "public". The public needed protection from the old film crew scams, which were public investment, but not public trading, and the public needs protecting from scammers in crowdfunding too. This particular law may be overkill, but there needs to be something.
No mutual funds, retirement funds, or anything similar should have anything to do with crowdfunding. The SEC has no place here. Crowdfunding is similar to buying raffle tickets at a Church bazaar and the SEC has no business messing with those, either.
Sorry, nope. Prizes for a raffle should be obtained before tickets are sold, so that everyone knows what they're buying. I may not be guaranteed to win anything, but I know somebody will, and that the winning is determined by random chance. In crowdfunding, I may personally be taking a gamble, but if I "win", so does everybody else, and that winning is not regulated by chance, but by the ability of the project team to deliver.
These abilities vary from project to project, unlike the rules of statistics, which are universal. It is therefore vital that someone assesses the credentials of crowdfunding projects, rather than leaving uninformed members of the public confused and convinced by pseudo-scientific technobabble.
It may be something of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but the basic problem with crowdfunding at the moment is that there is no need to write a proper business plan. CLANG, for example should never have been allowed on a crowdfunding site, because while it appeals to the sort of person who sees computers as some kind of mystical magic, it was clear to anyone with any clue about technology that they it was going nowhere. Crowdfunding sites may have been able to head off regulation earlier if they had been proactive in assessing proposals. Yes, it would have been more expensive than current crowdfunding fees, but it would have been less expensive than this.
The moral of the story is: cutting corners invites government regulation. (Unless you're a massive multinational, in which case cut away.)
If you want to view the contents of a text file, you really want to use either "more" or "less". Using "cat" is an ugly hack that is taught far too often in basic shell lessons for the sake of convenience when the files being worked with are a few lines long.
So far this submission has seen a really disappointing response from the Slashdot crowd. They look like braggarts who do not actually know anything about the subject matter.
Well, let's flip the question...
Ask Slashdot: Graphical User Interfaces -- What Is Out There?
However, there is software out there with GUI options that can make software features accessible to users. Some important ones I have uncovered are:
Photoshop
Audacity
LibreOffice
What else is out there?
It's a question that just has too tremendously wide a scope to be a practical conversation starter. Yes, people have been far too rude about it, but this should never have been accepted as a story.
Sadly, most functional experts are extremely poor at judging how to present their knowledge in such a way as to help others learn. It's at actually quite scary when you try to explain to others how you do something that you do without thinking, because when you can't explain it, it feels almost like, you don't know it, which makes you feel like an idiot. Suddenly your innocent question is a threat to the expert's ego and they lash out, feeling threatened.
No way. If you didn't spring fully-formed, fully-informed, and able to use the command-line perfectly, from the forehead of some deity, then you don't belong here. I mean, the rest of us here did. Seriously. There's never been a time when we didn't all know everything (except for you). Otherwise we'd just be admitting to a weakness, right?
Is it a "weakness" to be a mouse? Simply because we're on a higher evolutionary level than the muggles doesn't mean we're more important them. It is our duty as superior beings, born conversant in the mystic ways of CLI, to shepherd our lesser genetic cousins. With great power comes great responsibility.
GUIs aren't walled gardens, but GUI apps often are. The nature of the command line means that there is no practical difference between human control and machine control. With a GUI app, you have to explicitly program an API as an additional item in order to allow efficient machine control. The GUI supplies the walls -- the application is the garden.
We live in the 21th century. By now no one should use things like grep, sed or awk anymore.
Yes. It would be wrong to use tried, tested and computationally efficient tools. If it doesn't have a GUI that slows me down and reduces my operational efficiency, and a crapload of bugs that won't be fixed before being obsoleted, I don't want to know about it.
A marriage without chemistry is going to be difficult. Even in arranged marriages, chemistry is considered -- the mothers are looking for someone who will make their offspring both happy and secure, and will accept and be accepted by the rest of the family. (Of course, this ignores marrying-for-money and political marriages, but these are not the norm!)
I think the problem is more that these people have a complete unrealistic self-image. For tech people, you can observe that regularly in forums: The ones claiming the highest authority are typically somewhere from clueless to mediocre. I think this is the same effect at work. On the plus side, this means far less likelihood of these idiots reproducing, so I do not believe "fixing" this is desirable.
That may be a different issue: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Unless social grace can be considered an "expertise", which is an interesting philosophical notion.
How about Germany? You don't hear too much about conflicts within Germany.
Ahh... Germany... The reason Germany works is because it's a federal republic, where the regions can negotiate with each other and can push back against the central government. A very similar system to the US system that mtrachtenberg was decrying as "undemocratic".
If the Euros could make the EU work (perhaps with some major tweaks), it'd be better all around if various countries broke apart so that ethnic groups like the Basques and Corsicans can have their own small country and autonomy, while still enjoying the economic benefits of being part of a larger trade union.
"A Europe of the regions" as it is described. Sadly, the national governments don't want it, so the EU doesn't want it.
We were talking about "culturally homogenous" European countries, not linguistically. Languages are one indicator of cultural identity, but not the only one. The situation in France is actually particularly acrimonious, even more so than in Spain, and the French regions do not have any of the protections they have in Spain. Spain seems more troublesome than France precisely because the problem is officially recognised. In France, there is a flat-out denial of regional identities, with administrative boundaries redrawn contrary to local will (the city of Nantes, the capital of old Brittany, is no longer part of Brittany, and this is frequently protested about) and the French government refusing to ratify the European Charter of Minority Languages because "French is the language of the republic". Breton activists regularly protest by spraypainting or taking down French roadsigns (and I believe they've actually succeeded in getting some of their railway stations bilingually signed) and the Corsicans have a long history of shooting holes in the French half of bilingual roadsigns. While I was living in Corsica, the North Corsican assembly was putting through a bill to make Corsican co-official with French in the area, even though technically they had no powers to do so. It was an illegal act as an act of protest to France's treatment of regional languages.
The Saami are not analogous to the Pennsylvania Dutch. They're a minority population-wise, but they have a huge territory which leads to conflicts between the needs of the reindeer herders and the state's desire to open up mineral explorations in the area.
No it does not. "Demos" is not the Greek for "majority", but for "district". "Democracy" is "the rule of the district". In the traditional interpretation, this means "the rule of the district by the people of the district", and this is actually maintained in the federal system because the people of the district do not cede sovereignty in the way they do in a central parliamentary system.
Those European countries with the highest standards of living in the world, and the least amounts of corruption, are all small and relatively homogeneous culturally.
What, you mean countries like Switzerland, with its four (very) different national languages?
Like Norway and Sweden, with their Saami's in the north?
Like France, with its Basques, Bretons, Corsicans etc (etc etc)?
Yes, that is its political effect, and it is extremely anti-democratic.
How so? Wouldn't it be undemocratic if all the big states could, at the country level, impose laws on the smaller states without the consent of the inhabitants of said smaller states? The federal system grants limited sovereignty to the states, and considers the states as unitary bodies of equal power and importance.
Compare with the situation in the UK, which is made up of 4 constituent countries with vastly different population sizes, and with a parliament with MPs representing (roughly) the same amount of people as each other. There have only been two governments in the last century that would not have had a parliamentary majority without their Scottish seats, therefore the Scottish vote is considered irrelevant. Scotland is at best ignored, and at worst decried as a drain on the UK economy, and "national" UK infrastructure investment is always focused on the south-east of England.
Is that really what you aspire to? A situation where one group of people can consistently outvote another, and sparsely populated areas are deprived of all investment simply because the big guys don't care about who they vote for?
Almost... the full term was "libra pondo": pound weight. "Lira" is from "libra pondo", but it's the "libra" part, not the "pondo" part, so it's not really Italian for pound.
Except that "punt" is an Irish word, as in the language, so has an "oo" sound. (As did "pound" originally, incidentally -- it's English that has changed. Notice the pornunciation of "you" -- that's the original sound of OU.)
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't effect Kickstarter. The SEC only cares about crowd funded securities. I don't know of any kickstarter campaigns that gave stock as a reward.
Equity (=shares) is only one kind of security (otherwise they wouldn't have so many terms!). In a Kickstarter campaign, you give money for something that doesn't exist, establishing a debt. Does that debt qualify as a debt security? Probably not, as securities are by definition tradable, and there is no explicit mechanism in Kickstarter for the trading of debt -- you can promise your reward to someone else, but the obligation to fulfill rests with you and the third party has no direct involvement with the Kickstarter project.
However, the big motivating factor behind this law isn't the current Kickstarter style of crowdfunding, but the soon-to-exist tradeable-stocks-and-shares type of crowdfunding. It will shortly be legal in the US to sell small equity shares to the public after a long period where such "penny stock" was illegal (due to high levels of fraud) and therefore the SEC have to make regulations to protect the public from conmen.
If you want to use non-US crowdfunding, you're going to need a non-US company, and you may well end up relying on non-US backers, because different countries have different regulations about offshore investment.
Because while it may not be "traded" crowdfunding is still dealing with the "public". The public needed protection from the old film crew scams, which were public investment, but not public trading, and the public needs protecting from scammers in crowdfunding too. This particular law may be overkill, but there needs to be something.
No mutual funds, retirement funds, or anything similar should have anything to do with crowdfunding. The SEC has no place here. Crowdfunding is similar to buying raffle tickets at a Church bazaar and the SEC has no business messing with those, either.
Sorry, nope. Prizes for a raffle should be obtained before tickets are sold, so that everyone knows what they're buying. I may not be guaranteed to win anything, but I know somebody will, and that the winning is determined by random chance. In crowdfunding, I may personally be taking a gamble, but if I "win", so does everybody else, and that winning is not regulated by chance, but by the ability of the project team to deliver.
These abilities vary from project to project, unlike the rules of statistics, which are universal. It is therefore vital that someone assesses the credentials of crowdfunding projects, rather than leaving uninformed members of the public confused and convinced by pseudo-scientific technobabble.
It may be something of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but the basic problem with crowdfunding at the moment is that there is no need to write a proper business plan. CLANG, for example should never have been allowed on a crowdfunding site, because while it appeals to the sort of person who sees computers as some kind of mystical magic, it was clear to anyone with any clue about technology that they it was going nowhere. Crowdfunding sites may have been able to head off regulation earlier if they had been proactive in assessing proposals. Yes, it would have been more expensive than current crowdfunding fees, but it would have been less expensive than this.
The moral of the story is: cutting corners invites government regulation. (Unless you're a massive multinational, in which case cut away.)
If you want to view the contents of a text file, you really want to use either "more" or "less". Using "cat" is an ugly hack that is taught far too often in basic shell lessons for the sake of convenience when the files being worked with are a few lines long.
So far this submission has seen a really disappointing response from the Slashdot crowd. They look like braggarts who do not actually know anything about the subject matter.
Well, let's flip the question...
Ask Slashdot: Graphical User Interfaces -- What Is Out There?
However, there is software out there with GUI options that can make software features accessible to users. Some important ones I have uncovered are:
Photoshop
Audacity
LibreOffice
What else is out there?
It's a question that just has too tremendously wide a scope to be a practical conversation starter. Yes, people have been far too rude about it, but this should never have been accepted as a story.
My first modem used two baked bean cans and a taut string. I await my invitation to the Playboy Mansion with great anticipation.
if you refuse to help with Lunix except for "RTFM and get off my lawn."
This is not the place to discuss alternative operating systems for the Commodore 64.
I grew up wanting to learn, is that welcome here?
Sadly, most functional experts are extremely poor at judging how to present their knowledge in such a way as to help others learn. It's at actually quite scary when you try to explain to others how you do something that you do without thinking, because when you can't explain it, it feels almost like, you don't know it, which makes you feel like an idiot. Suddenly your innocent question is a threat to the expert's ego and they lash out, feeling threatened.
No way. If you didn't spring fully-formed, fully-informed, and able to use the command-line perfectly, from the forehead of some deity, then you don't belong here. I mean, the rest of us here did. Seriously. There's never been a time when we didn't all know everything (except for you). Otherwise we'd just be admitting to a weakness, right?
Is it a "weakness" to be a mouse? Simply because we're on a higher evolutionary level than the muggles doesn't mean we're more important them. It is our duty as superior beings, born conversant in the mystic ways of CLI, to shepherd our lesser genetic cousins. With great power comes great responsibility.
GUIs aren't walled gardens, but GUI apps often are. The nature of the command line means that there is no practical difference between human control and machine control. With a GUI app, you have to explicitly program an API as an additional item in order to allow efficient machine control. The GUI supplies the walls -- the application is the garden.
We live in the 21th century. By now no one should use things like grep, sed or awk anymore.
Yes. It would be wrong to use tried, tested and computationally efficient tools. If it doesn't have a GUI that slows me down and reduces my operational efficiency, and a crapload of bugs that won't be fixed before being obsoleted, I don't want to know about it.
A marriage without chemistry is going to be difficult. Even in arranged marriages, chemistry is considered -- the mothers are looking for someone who will make their offspring both happy and secure, and will accept and be accepted by the rest of the family. (Of course, this ignores marrying-for-money and political marriages, but these are not the norm!)
I think the problem is more that these people have a complete unrealistic self-image. For tech people, you can observe that regularly in forums: The ones claiming the highest authority are typically somewhere from clueless to mediocre. I think this is the same effect at work. On the plus side, this means far less likelihood of these idiots reproducing, so I do not believe "fixing" this is desirable.
That may be a different issue: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Unless social grace can be considered an "expertise", which is an interesting philosophical notion.
How about Germany? You don't hear too much about conflicts within Germany.
Ahh... Germany... The reason Germany works is because it's a federal republic, where the regions can negotiate with each other and can push back against the central government. A very similar system to the US system that mtrachtenberg was decrying as "undemocratic".
If the Euros could make the EU work (perhaps with some major tweaks), it'd be better all around if various countries broke apart so that ethnic groups like the Basques and Corsicans can have their own small country and autonomy, while still enjoying the economic benefits of being part of a larger trade union.
"A Europe of the regions" as it is described. Sadly, the national governments don't want it, so the EU doesn't want it.
We were talking about "culturally homogenous" European countries, not linguistically. Languages are one indicator of cultural identity, but not the only one. The situation in France is actually particularly acrimonious, even more so than in Spain, and the French regions do not have any of the protections they have in Spain. Spain seems more troublesome than France precisely because the problem is officially recognised. In France, there is a flat-out denial of regional identities, with administrative boundaries redrawn contrary to local will (the city of Nantes, the capital of old Brittany, is no longer part of Brittany, and this is frequently protested about) and the French government refusing to ratify the European Charter of Minority Languages because "French is the language of the republic". Breton activists regularly protest by spraypainting or taking down French roadsigns (and I believe they've actually succeeded in getting some of their railway stations bilingually signed) and the Corsicans have a long history of shooting holes in the French half of bilingual roadsigns. While I was living in Corsica, the North Corsican assembly was putting through a bill to make Corsican co-official with French in the area, even though technically they had no powers to do so. It was an illegal act as an act of protest to France's treatment of regional languages.
The Saami are not analogous to the Pennsylvania Dutch. They're a minority population-wise, but they have a huge territory which leads to conflicts between the needs of the reindeer herders and the state's desire to open up mineral explorations in the area.
Italian is a minority, but I wouldn't say "tiny". Romansch, yes.
And as for France, while they've made great strides in removing the regional languages, the regional identities and cultures are still pretty strong.
No, democracy *means* majority rule.
No it does not. "Demos" is not the Greek for "majority", but for "district". "Democracy" is "the rule of the district". In the traditional interpretation, this means "the rule of the district by the people of the district", and this is actually maintained in the federal system because the people of the district do not cede sovereignty in the way they do in a central parliamentary system.
Those European countries with the highest standards of living in the world, and the least amounts of corruption, are all small and relatively homogeneous culturally.
What, you mean countries like Switzerland, with its four (very) different national languages?
Like Norway and Sweden, with their Saami's in the north?
Like France, with its Basques, Bretons, Corsicans etc (etc etc)?
Yes, that is its political effect, and it is extremely anti-democratic.
How so? Wouldn't it be undemocratic if all the big states could, at the country level, impose laws on the smaller states without the consent of the inhabitants of said smaller states? The federal system grants limited sovereignty to the states, and considers the states as unitary bodies of equal power and importance.
Compare with the situation in the UK, which is made up of 4 constituent countries with vastly different population sizes, and with a parliament with MPs representing (roughly) the same amount of people as each other. There have only been two governments in the last century that would not have had a parliamentary majority without their Scottish seats, therefore the Scottish vote is considered irrelevant. Scotland is at best ignored, and at worst decried as a drain on the UK economy, and "national" UK infrastructure investment is always focused on the south-east of England.
Is that really what you aspire to? A situation where one group of people can consistently outvote another, and sparsely populated areas are deprived of all investment simply because the big guys don't care about who they vote for?
Give me a federal system any day.
Almost... the full term was "libra pondo": pound weight. "Lira" is from "libra pondo", but it's the "libra" part, not the "pondo" part, so it's not really Italian for pound.
Except that "punt" is an Irish word, as in the language, so has an "oo" sound. (As did "pound" originally, incidentally -- it's English that has changed. Notice the pornunciation of "you" -- that's the original sound of OU.)
If it's a stand on principle, you should stick by your principle. Otherwise it just sounds like rationalisation.
Good news. He was always my favourite. Maybe we'll get more episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine now.