There's a few companies doing Loran/GPS-like tracking of police radio transmissions based on time of signal receipt time at various antennae. Accuracy varies with precision of time signal, availability of multiple receivers, etc.
And I was only avoiding updating it because the last time our PCs were clamoring for Java updates it was actually a (well disguised) trojan.
The next thing Windows needs to add is a "don't bother me with this update" API where software vendors need to ask the OS permission before prompting the user for updates - and also allow preference settings like "don't install a damn desktop launch icon when you update" (looking at you Adobe.) Personally, I'd set my preferences to "don't tell me about updates until they are at least a month old." There is a balance to strike between getting the latest patches for security and waiting until a patch has proven itself in the wild.
Of course, we could all just stop using software from vendors who don't do these things voluntarily (like check for bugs before pushing an update, or making an easy to access preference for launch icon settings (hint: if I've deleted the last 12 of them, I likely don't want the 13th!) but the software that I'm talking about here is Java and Acrobat - kind of hard to get around the web without those.
Also there are many places where you just can't get equipment.
And, that is changing. Wasn't long ago there were many places where you just couldn't make a phone call... Tech work doesn't have to be complicated, a lot of it is more brain-dead than operating a shovel.
As a parent of one child who is homeschooled (because the system can't manage to put together any kind of "Appropriate" education), and another child who is currently doing well in Public School, but may end up being pulled at any moment for the same reasons, I couldn't agree more that homeschooling should be compensated.
Unfortunately, homeschooling is far too easy to opt-in to, I doubt they will ever hang a $20K reward out there for anything that any parent can simply sign a piece of paper for.
Specifically: commercial banks don't just store and lend currency; they create it. Every time a loan is generated more currency - actual money in circulation - comes into existence.
But you think: commercial banks can't just spontaneously create money, right? That's what the central banks do!
Well, yes, that's the simple side of the story. What matters is not how much currency exists, but how much of it is "currently" in circulation. Providing a loan from cash on deposit is one way to put cash back into circulation, printing more of it (and spending it on Government contracts) is another. Handing every schmo on the street an extra $20 next Friday is also a good way to put an extra $5B into circulation real fast.
Where the story gets interesting is when players who have so much wealth they can't access it all at once without destroying much of it, start to move pieces of their wealth - for example, if the Saudi Royal family decides they want to buy, oh, maybe Key West, for example. At current market valuations, they have the cash, but dumping that many dollars into circulation all at once will have a noticeable devaluation effect on the dollar - not to mention driving up the price of the slower moving pieces of real-estate to astronomical proportions. On the flip-side, there are individuals who hold huge amounts of real-estate, significant chunks of multi-billion dollar companies, etc. and if these people want to liquidate their holdings and turn them to dollars all at once, the market value of their holdings will plummet - and if many of these people try to liquidate all at once, it can screw up the economy for everyone else... as has happened recently.
Third world countries have periodically invalidated their currency, mostly to get a handle on the people who have amassed too much of it. It will be interesting to see if the "first world" is pushed into a similar maneuver, I look to Japan as a model for what is probably coming in the West over the next 10 years, a sort of happy stagnation - at least I hope the West manages that soft of a landing.
How high is the percentage of geeks in the world? I'd say it's just over 10%, but then why isn't the world a better place, for example with functioning space programs?!
There are true geeks and poseur geeks, I think true geeks - with extraordinary talents and abilities - are closer to 1% of the total population. The other 9% you're talking about are just ordinary dysfunctionals who aspire to be geek-like, but never really amount to anything.
I think everybody has their own quasi-religious convictions about "how this works" - my personal spin is that private wealth outweighs government wealth by a large factor (on the order of 10:1), and whether intentionally, or by their whim, private money decides the fate of the economy the rest of us live in far more dramatically than the Fed or any other governmental controls.
I always felt that.com bubble #1 was a dramatic example of what happens when the rich get excited about something - the Dubai construction boom is probably another good example. Of course, at some point, the euphoria wears off and the conservative rich pull back in a power-play, giving those who pulled back first a leg-up in the next round.
I also feel that life is too short to worry much about how all that "really works" and what I might personally do about it, there's enough smoke, mirrors, indirection, and personal caprice built into the power structure that you might as well just identify how the gross contours of the current economic landscape affect your life and go with it. By the time you've completed a root cause analysis, you will have expended a lot of resources that could have better been used enjoying your life and/or improving the life of your children.
If you want to 'move and shake' you had better be good in the first place. I think most people can be good at something. The world needs ditch diggers too.
I don't know, my perspective on life is that the world needs better geeks to develop better ditch digging robots, and the people required to manufacture and maintain those robots - if all we need are ditch diggers, we're not far enough off from living in lean-tos and throwing rocks at one another to settle arguments, for my taste.
The total economy would theoretically be worth the ~6 million coins in existence multiplied by $13 USD or $78 million. Penny stocks are not necessarily bad companies, just companies that trade for less than $1. Any company can be a penny stock if they issue enough shares.
Bitcoin isn't necessarily puffing itself up either. It's actually a very good idea. Whether this incarnation is a flash in the pan or not only time will tell, but cryptocurrency is a permanent thing now.
Thanks for the additional info, and, I suppose you could call $80M a somewhat significant phenomenon. My point about penny stocks was more directed at the fact that a great many of them are in some way a shell of their former self, most of them have lost a great deal of value to arrive at share prices in the 0.01 to 0.30 range. I worked for a penny stock company for 10+ years, we were a good company, delivering best-in-world products for our market - nonetheless, it was a small outfit, never more than 20 employees, and when it's value did occasionally pop up around the $80M mark, it was mostly due to hype (not internally generated or encouraged by the company, more like amusedly observed from a distance...)
One need look no further than the pets.com era of the first internet bubble to find valuations much higher than $80M for ideas that clearly were not worth much more than the napkin they were sketched on.
The problem with our education system is simple; it's run by politicians. Education should not be run by people who a) don't have a solid grasp of the material they are mandating and b) are more interested in reelection.
and c) have a vested interest in the populace being uneducated therefore easier to manipulate. A fox guarding the henhouse situation.
My local schoolboard is not nearly clever (or far-thinking) enough to go for any kind of indirect strategy like that. They'd be just fine with the kids getting a good education, as long as they get re-elected and continue to enjoy their perks. Unfortunately, the only re-election strategy that 5/6 of them can imagine is "LOWER TAXES!!!!"
The problem with our education system is simple; it's run by politicians. Education should not be run by people who a) don't have a solid grasp of the material they are mandating and b) are more interested in reelection.
The only way we'll get meaningful reform is by pushing control ( ie: money ) down to the county level and letting them figure it out.
Fundamental control (setting of millage rates, construction of buildings, hiring of staff) is down at the county level - they have screwed it up so badly for so long that there is now a Byzantine complex of laws telling them what they must do to comply, many of which are contradictory.
Engage a determined lawyer and you can get your local schoolboard to do almost anything, there are laws to back you up.
School's primary lessons are: 1) Sit down and wait, 2) Shut up and do as you are told, 3) If you don't, you will suffer.
Did you learn the above in K-12? If not, you will have major problems for the rest of your life until you do. Most of the other stuff they teach is purely optional, window dressing for the majority of the workforce.
Actually, it still is. The money supply can only keep expanding as long as debt keeps increasing. Once everybody has taken on all the debt they can handle, the money supply will *have* to contract (which will be catastrophic to the economy), or the fed will have to issue money like mad to keep stringing it along (which will be catastrophic to the economy). The pyramid still eventually runs dry even if everyone's bought in.
So, how did the debt contract during the Clinton years?
there is a need for more freedoms in the economy, freedoms from government intervention, government subsidies, taxes, regulations.
If this is the goal, education is starting at ground zero. One of the fundamental tenants of the public education in the U.S. is that it is provided free of charge, paid for by tax dollars. If you turn that on its head and make parents pay for their children's education, there will be a vast class of uneducated children - who are themselves much less likely to be any kind of asset to the country, unless you think we're heading for a Soylent Green future?
One major problem with education is that is is big - really really big, like healthcare and military spending. $5B over 10 years is something like 5 cents per student per day.
So, while an impressive feat for a single man to accomplish, approaching every student in the U.S. every morning for 10 years and saying "hey kid, here's a nickel, try to do a better job in school today," is apparently about as effective as you would imagine it to be.
And, the real problem, while Bill was giving kids a nickel, the local taxing authorities were cutting back by dimes, quarters and dollars - if you don't get a lid on that behavior, you'll never make positive progress.
In Florida, a liability policy is required for each license tag - if you tag the car, you must show proof of insurance for that car to get the tag. If said insurance lapses, then they suspend your driving license. I see more than one logical flaw in the system, but that doesn't change the laws or how they are enforced.
So if there happens to be a cop in or near the car that you didn't see for some reason, and he sees you pointing a gunshaped object at his car (close enough to him that you might be pointing at him) do you expect him to wait until you shoot so he can be sure whether you're shooting a cap gun, paint gun, or bullet gun?
Pointing a paintball gun at a cop car is a good way to get yourself killed.
Good point, however, the parent was suggesting attacking the cop car with a ball-peen hammer, between the two, I'd take action at a distance, with appropriate discretion in the visual profile presented to any observers, especially the cops. I think the appropriate distance is to challenge the whole notion through the courts, but you can take it to the other extreme too...
Slashdot Mirror
What is new here?
Complete lack of dependency upon satellite signals?
There's a few companies doing Loran/GPS-like tracking of police radio transmissions based on time of signal receipt time at various antennae. Accuracy varies with precision of time signal, availability of multiple receivers, etc.
gcc
There's a manager at Oracle who would have lost his quarterly bonus if 7 didn't ship on time, you wouldn't have wanted him to do that, would you?
And I was only avoiding updating it because the last time our PCs were clamoring for Java updates it was actually a (well disguised) trojan.
The next thing Windows needs to add is a "don't bother me with this update" API where software vendors need to ask the OS permission before prompting the user for updates - and also allow preference settings like "don't install a damn desktop launch icon when you update" (looking at you Adobe.) Personally, I'd set my preferences to "don't tell me about updates until they are at least a month old." There is a balance to strike between getting the latest patches for security and waiting until a patch has proven itself in the wild.
Of course, we could all just stop using software from vendors who don't do these things voluntarily (like check for bugs before pushing an update, or making an easy to access preference for launch icon settings (hint: if I've deleted the last 12 of them, I likely don't want the 13th!) but the software that I'm talking about here is Java and Acrobat - kind of hard to get around the web without those.
Also there are many places where you just can't get equipment.
And, that is changing. Wasn't long ago there were many places where you just couldn't make a phone call... Tech work doesn't have to be complicated, a lot of it is more brain-dead than operating a shovel.
As a parent of one child who is homeschooled (because the system can't manage to put together any kind of "Appropriate" education), and another child who is currently doing well in Public School, but may end up being pulled at any moment for the same reasons, I couldn't agree more that homeschooling should be compensated.
Unfortunately, homeschooling is far too easy to opt-in to, I doubt they will ever hang a $20K reward out there for anything that any parent can simply sign a piece of paper for.
Specifically: commercial banks don't just store and lend currency; they create it. Every time a loan is generated more currency - actual money in circulation - comes into existence.
But you think: commercial banks can't just spontaneously create money, right? That's what the central banks do!
Well, yes, that's the simple side of the story. What matters is not how much currency exists, but how much of it is "currently" in circulation. Providing a loan from cash on deposit is one way to put cash back into circulation, printing more of it (and spending it on Government contracts) is another. Handing every schmo on the street an extra $20 next Friday is also a good way to put an extra $5B into circulation real fast.
Where the story gets interesting is when players who have so much wealth they can't access it all at once without destroying much of it, start to move pieces of their wealth - for example, if the Saudi Royal family decides they want to buy, oh, maybe Key West, for example. At current market valuations, they have the cash, but dumping that many dollars into circulation all at once will have a noticeable devaluation effect on the dollar - not to mention driving up the price of the slower moving pieces of real-estate to astronomical proportions. On the flip-side, there are individuals who hold huge amounts of real-estate, significant chunks of multi-billion dollar companies, etc. and if these people want to liquidate their holdings and turn them to dollars all at once, the market value of their holdings will plummet - and if many of these people try to liquidate all at once, it can screw up the economy for everyone else... as has happened recently.
Third world countries have periodically invalidated their currency, mostly to get a handle on the people who have amassed too much of it. It will be interesting to see if the "first world" is pushed into a similar maneuver, I look to Japan as a model for what is probably coming in the West over the next 10 years, a sort of happy stagnation - at least I hope the West manages that soft of a landing.
How high is the percentage of geeks in the world? I'd say it's just over 10%, but then why isn't the world a better place, for example with functioning space programs?!
There are true geeks and poseur geeks, I think true geeks - with extraordinary talents and abilities - are closer to 1% of the total population. The other 9% you're talking about are just ordinary dysfunctionals who aspire to be geek-like, but never really amount to anything.
I'm talking about private debt, not the federal debt.
An introduction to how this works:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Money_multiplier
I think everybody has their own quasi-religious convictions about "how this works" - my personal spin is that private wealth outweighs government wealth by a large factor (on the order of 10:1), and whether intentionally, or by their whim, private money decides the fate of the economy the rest of us live in far more dramatically than the Fed or any other governmental controls.
I always felt that .com bubble #1 was a dramatic example of what happens when the rich get excited about something - the Dubai construction boom is probably another good example. Of course, at some point, the euphoria wears off and the conservative rich pull back in a power-play, giving those who pulled back first a leg-up in the next round.
I also feel that life is too short to worry much about how all that "really works" and what I might personally do about it, there's enough smoke, mirrors, indirection, and personal caprice built into the power structure that you might as well just identify how the gross contours of the current economic landscape affect your life and go with it. By the time you've completed a root cause analysis, you will have expended a lot of resources that could have better been used enjoying your life and/or improving the life of your children.
If they all do at once it won't work for sure.
If you want to 'move and shake' you had better be good in the first place. I think most people can be good at something. The world needs ditch diggers too.
I don't know, my perspective on life is that the world needs better geeks to develop better ditch digging robots, and the people required to manufacture and maintain those robots - if all we need are ditch diggers, we're not far enough off from living in lean-tos and throwing rocks at one another to settle arguments, for my taste.
If you learned those lessons too well you will also suffer.
Granting those are important skills. The really important skill is knowing when to 'move and shake' and when not to.
Agreed, but if everybody moves and shakes, it won't work for any of them.
The total economy would theoretically be worth the ~6 million coins in existence multiplied by $13 USD or $78 million. Penny stocks are not necessarily bad companies, just companies that trade for less than $1. Any company can be a penny stock if they issue enough shares.
Bitcoin isn't necessarily puffing itself up either. It's actually a very good idea. Whether this incarnation is a flash in the pan or not only time will tell, but cryptocurrency is a permanent thing now.
Thanks for the additional info, and, I suppose you could call $80M a somewhat significant phenomenon. My point about penny stocks was more directed at the fact that a great many of them are in some way a shell of their former self, most of them have lost a great deal of value to arrive at share prices in the 0.01 to 0.30 range. I worked for a penny stock company for 10+ years, we were a good company, delivering best-in-world products for our market - nonetheless, it was a small outfit, never more than 20 employees, and when it's value did occasionally pop up around the $80M mark, it was mostly due to hype (not internally generated or encouraged by the company, more like amusedly observed from a distance...)
One need look no further than the pets.com era of the first internet bubble to find valuations much higher than $80M for ideas that clearly were not worth much more than the napkin they were sketched on.
The problem with our education system is simple; it's run by politicians. Education should not be run by people who a) don't have a solid grasp of the material they are mandating and b) are more interested in reelection.
and c) have a vested interest in the populace being uneducated therefore easier to manipulate. A fox guarding the henhouse situation.
My local schoolboard is not nearly clever (or far-thinking) enough to go for any kind of indirect strategy like that. They'd be just fine with the kids getting a good education, as long as they get re-elected and continue to enjoy their perks. Unfortunately, the only re-election strategy that 5/6 of them can imagine is "LOWER TAXES!!!!"
The problem with our education system is simple; it's run by politicians. Education should not be run by people who a) don't have a solid grasp of the material they are mandating and b) are more interested in reelection.
The only way we'll get meaningful reform is by pushing control ( ie: money ) down to the county level and letting them figure it out.
Fundamental control (setting of millage rates, construction of buildings, hiring of staff) is down at the county level - they have screwed it up so badly for so long that there is now a Byzantine complex of laws telling them what they must do to comply, many of which are contradictory.
Engage a determined lawyer and you can get your local schoolboard to do almost anything, there are laws to back you up.
School's primary lessons are: 1) Sit down and wait, 2) Shut up and do as you are told, 3) If you don't, you will suffer.
Did you learn the above in K-12? If not, you will have major problems for the rest of your life until you do. Most of the other stuff they teach is purely optional, window dressing for the majority of the workforce.
Paraphrasing: "At the time of writing the total Bitcoin economy was worth $500,000."
Most penny-stock companies can puff-up $10M of market cap on less hot-air than Bitcoin promoters have expended.
Actually, it still is. The money supply can only keep expanding as long as debt keeps increasing. Once everybody has taken on all the debt they can handle, the money supply will *have* to contract (which will be catastrophic to the economy), or the fed will have to issue money like mad to keep stringing it along (which will be catastrophic to the economy). The pyramid still eventually runs dry even if everyone's bought in.
So, how did the debt contract during the Clinton years?
They don't have to be unionized to be fundamentally broken.
there is a need for more freedoms in the economy, freedoms from government intervention, government subsidies, taxes, regulations.
If this is the goal, education is starting at ground zero. One of the fundamental tenants of the public education in the U.S. is that it is provided free of charge, paid for by tax dollars. If you turn that on its head and make parents pay for their children's education, there will be a vast class of uneducated children - who are themselves much less likely to be any kind of asset to the country, unless you think we're heading for a Soylent Green future?
One major problem with education is that is is big - really really big, like healthcare and military spending. $5B over 10 years is something like 5 cents per student per day.
So, while an impressive feat for a single man to accomplish, approaching every student in the U.S. every morning for 10 years and saying "hey kid, here's a nickel, try to do a better job in school today," is apparently about as effective as you would imagine it to be.
And, the real problem, while Bill was giving kids a nickel, the local taxing authorities were cutting back by dimes, quarters and dollars - if you don't get a lid on that behavior, you'll never make positive progress.
The debt-driven US dollar is the biggest ponzi scheme ever.
It's not a ponzi scheme if EVERYBODY plays.
I call BS! It's certainly a waste of energy.
While I tend to agree, opponents of Bitcoin seem to be falling into a Streisand Effect trap - the louder you shout, the more you hurt your cause.
In Florida, a liability policy is required for each license tag - if you tag the car, you must show proof of insurance for that car to get the tag. If said insurance lapses, then they suspend your driving license. I see more than one logical flaw in the system, but that doesn't change the laws or how they are enforced.
So if there happens to be a cop in or near the car that you didn't see for some reason, and he sees you pointing a gunshaped object at his car (close enough to him that you might be pointing at him) do you expect him to wait until you shoot so he can be sure whether you're shooting a cap gun, paint gun, or bullet gun?
Pointing a paintball gun at a cop car is a good way to get yourself killed.
Good point, however, the parent was suggesting attacking the cop car with a ball-peen hammer, between the two, I'd take action at a distance, with appropriate discretion in the visual profile presented to any observers, especially the cops. I think the appropriate distance is to challenge the whole notion through the courts, but you can take it to the other extreme too...