No/. discussion is complete without the bad car analogy:
I see this as being a similar false economy to the plug-in hybrid that people drive to work and charge for "free."
At this very moment, my work computer has all 4 cores pegged, generating one bitcoin every 45 minutes (except when the java periodically hangs up...) So, I'm using my employer's landlord's electricity (which my employer gets for a fixed price in the lease) to generate bitcoin. I win, but ultimately, somebody else is paying the price.
Really, it's the landlord's own fault, the air-conditioner is from the 1960s and only has one setting which results in about 64F at my desk, if I weren't generating bitcoin, I'd be doing un-necessary FPGA compiles to keep warm.
At least if we all had the same faith in bitcoin it would be impossible for the government or central bank to devalue our currency, effectively robbing everyone of their savings.
Look at it this way: the richest 2% are losing far more when the currency is devalued than the average person. Of course, they are also diversified, but I'd be willing to bet most of them hold significant quantities of currency.
The average schmo is in debt well over his head, devaluing the currency actually helps him.
to fine him more money than he will ever make is too much.
Sure, the city already won when they got the passwords, but they wanted to make the point that they can run up the score. It probably makes little to no difference in Terry Childs life whether he was released or fined $1.5M at this point in time, either way he's not going to get more than subsistence pay for the next seven years.
But... just incase there's somebody with more means (read: more to lose) than Terry in the future, they're hoping for a deterrent effect.
I'd like to remind the audience about the effectiveness of public hanging of pickpockets...
He caused no damage in the "real world," but he tied up the courts and the city's lawyers, and you know, at $500 per billable hour, 1.5M is only 3000 man hours, or 3 lawyers for 6 months, plus expenses.
Essentially, the judge has handed him a bankruptcy sentence - something he may not have been far from anyway.
It's not just corporate interests that are represented - big farmers, plenty of rich individuals, anybody with the time, money and desire to have a voice in Washington has one.
Unfortunately, the majority of the population can barely afford to take their annual 2 week vacation in Washington D.C., and even if they took that step, they are out-competed by the lobbyists who have setup multi-story office buildings inside the beltway devoted to bending their representatives' ears.
We can write e-mails, but somehow that feels ineffective when compared to lobbyists who sponsor first class travel and entertainment to help make their point.
Simple, until you go to define "take in" - then the rules, exceptions, traditions, auditors, lawyers and the rest of 'em can jump right back into the game.
As an individual working for a paycheck, you are, by tradition, screwed. That paycheck is your income.
A company that mines bauxite and charges $473 million per year to their customers for raw ore, might spend $453 million a year on machinery, energy, and personnel. If you tax them $71 million a year in taxes, they will either have to pass that on to their customers, or vertically integrate with the customer so the transaction is no longer "tax exposed..."
This sounds like a great idea as long as it also makes the system more fair by optimizing out the tax cuts for the rich.
Ah, but your attitude is part of the problem. Simplification is change, redistributing the tax burden is change, change costs political capital, and nobody has enough political capital to simplify AND rebalance the tax code at the same time.
Or, we could just make it a flat tax with no exceptions.
No such thing (as no exceptions.)
Do we tax gross receipts, or profit? Profit is an imaginary construct that is only defined by rules - rules that could become as complex as the tax code itself.
So, tax gross receipts - at what level? Retail, wholesale, personal income, goods, services, inheritance, barter? Again, all are imaginary constructs defined by rules - make the rules simple and new imaginary constructs will pop up to circumvent the simple rules.
It's like any written definition, it starts out to the effect of "I know it when I see it," and grows from there.
If the U.S.A. is to survive for another couple of centuries, it is going to need a functioning system for purging of the laws, especially now that they are being written and passed as documents that require a team of people months to analyze even superficially.
Think about it: when you walk into a restaurant and buy a meal, do you deliberately buy more than you can afford? Repeatedly? For decades? And then go to your boss and say "I demand a raise because I spent too much"?
Most politicians are not in for decades, and even the ones who are have no accountability for their actions.
If you could walk into that restaurant with 534 of your friends, order what you like, and know that the restaurant will accept 60 cents on the dollar because without your business it would have to close, what would you do?
When I say 'all profits', I mean all profits, no exceptions.
Ah, but you have not defined profits.
Profits are monies received, less expenses.
Assuming you can even get a fair accounting of monies received, how do you define expenses?
I once had a CEO who boasted that he was "the lowest paid employee in the company." Of course, in addition to his salary, the company paid for his smartphone, car (new lease every 2 years), fuel, most meals (he liked steakhouses), his apartment (on Miami Beach), and likely his clothes and other "business related expenses." This, in addition to a hefty stock incentive that would have translated to 10 years of the highest paid employee's salary if he had made remotely good on his projections of success.
He was small-time, the big boys expense Citation jets.
Profit is that money which the executives choose not to spend. This, more than anything, is what is wrong with "tax on profits."
In the movie business, any actor with negotiating power demands royalties as a percentage of receipts, not profits. The studio can always make profits disappear.
And such exemptions to the tax code have to be voted on their own, not as an amedment to any other bill, period.
This ^^^ granularity in voting, would create transparency, and allow people to judge their elected officials based on their actions, leading to accountability in politics.
Absolutely incorrect - it could be done. The better question is "can it be done without making things worse than they already are?" In an ideal world, again, the answer is yes. In the world we live in, the outcome is uncertain, and turning politicians loose on a new adventure doesn't usually go well.
The problem is in "doing it" in the best interests of the whole (or at least, a majority of) the country. As things are structured now, "key players" have entrenched themselves such that they have the politicians believing that what is good for the key players is good for the country. Short term, they may be right.
Of course, if a mugger has a gun pointed at you, short term, the better thing for you is to toss over your wallet like he asks and not make any threats that "you'll get him later."
Man, if you just RTFA you'd find much bigger BS targets:
Bitcoins are created by a complex algorithm. Only 21M can be made by the year 2140. Your desktop bitcoin software can make bitcoins, but at this point the electricity and time it would take to produce a bitcoin is larger than the actual value of a bitcoin (your laptop might take five years to make one, and they currently trade at $6.70 per bitcoin [ see https://mtgox.com/trade/buy for the latest exchange rate ].
Bitcoin miners use super cheap GPUs (not CPUs) to create the coins, but as more people come online to make them, the algorithm adjusts so that one block can only be made every 10 minutes.
O.K. - logically, what algorithm would prevent duplicate hardware from making duplicate coins in 2 locations at one time? If there's no central authority, how is the one block every 10 minutes rule enforced? How will your prostitute hiring iPhone know the difference between a coin "mined" on one piece of hardware from another?
Bitcoins are virtual coins in the form of a file that is stored on your device. These coins can be sent to and from users three ways:
1. Direct with peer-to-peer software downloaded at bitcoin.org 2. Via an escrow service like ClearCoin 3. Via a bitcoin currency exchange
Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.
The benefits of a currency like this:
a) Your coins can’t be frozen (like a Paypal account can be) b) Your coins can’t be tracked c) Your coins can’t be taxed d) Transaction costs are extremely low (sorry credit card companies)
Just a few reactions:
a) Not only can your coin be frozen, but any coin you transferred can also be frozen by identification of your signature - there may be a "cash economy" where bitcoin is exchanged without oversight among iPods, etc., but when it hits a regulated transaction processor, it's even worse than putting cash in the bank. b) I'm sorry, if your signature can't be tracked, what good is it? c) The author sorely underestimates taxing authorities, at a minimum, the government can demand that you self report transactions, much as they do for cash and similar instruments today. d) Credit card companies' transaction costs are also extremely low...
I don't know, I got an El-Al security interview in Paris at what was about 3am on my body clock. I would have rather just stood there and been patted down than answer all the questions they asked. The interview went on and on until I pointed over at my (Jewish) boss and his wife and said "Look, I'm with them." Apparently that was good enough.
That is a horribly ignorant way to look at it. Physical materials - even relatively simple ones like base elements - cannot be simply described as a mathematical value. You can say "Oh, it's element___ with this many protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, leptons, etc" but you'd still be leaving out a MASSIVE amount of data which would be required to completely describe(mathematically) the object's form and composition.
I'm pretty sure that most atomic weapon design and testing has been done by mathematical (granted, probabilistic Monte Carlo type) simulation. If the reports are to be believed, those programs describe the end result very accurately.
I'm pretty sure that in the late 1930s, the process to make Little Boy and Fat Man would have been patentable under any purview that considered any kind of patents to be valid.
And, in the end, all they are is the bringing together of big lumps of elementary material, albeit highly refined from what is found in nature, to bring about a reaction that, itself (after decades of study), can now be reduced to a set of mathematical equations.
As for software patents, some wiener patented the use of XOR to draw a cursor... if that can stand, why not anything else, like one-click order taking?
I truly hope we have hit bottom of the patent well, but I'm sure there's an army of attorneys out there willing to dig with ever sharper tools.
Slashdot Mirror
No /. discussion is complete without the bad car analogy:
I see this as being a similar false economy to the plug-in hybrid that people drive to work and charge for "free."
At this very moment, my work computer has all 4 cores pegged, generating one bitcoin every 45 minutes (except when the java periodically hangs up...) So, I'm using my employer's landlord's electricity (which my employer gets for a fixed price in the lease) to generate bitcoin. I win, but ultimately, somebody else is paying the price.
Really, it's the landlord's own fault, the air-conditioner is from the 1960s and only has one setting which results in about 64F at my desk, if I weren't generating bitcoin, I'd be doing un-necessary FPGA compiles to keep warm.
At least if we all had the same faith in bitcoin it would be impossible for the government or central bank to devalue our currency, effectively robbing everyone of their savings.
Look at it this way: the richest 2% are losing far more when the currency is devalued than the average person. Of course, they are also diversified, but I'd be willing to bet most of them hold significant quantities of currency.
The average schmo is in debt well over his head, devaluing the currency actually helps him.
Which is growing rather rapidly, for the record.
Any growth from zero is impressive when expressed as a percentage.
to fine him more money than he will ever make is too much.
Sure, the city already won when they got the passwords, but they wanted to make the point that they can run up the score. It probably makes little to no difference in Terry Childs life whether he was released or fined $1.5M at this point in time, either way he's not going to get more than subsistence pay for the next seven years.
But... just incase there's somebody with more means (read: more to lose) than Terry in the future, they're hoping for a deterrent effect.
I'd like to remind the audience about the effectiveness of public hanging of pickpockets...
Might want to wait seven years before you pay him... until then all his earnings will be garnished.
He caused no damage in the "real world," but he tied up the courts and the city's lawyers, and you know, at $500 per billable hour, 1.5M is only 3000 man hours, or 3 lawyers for 6 months, plus expenses.
Essentially, the judge has handed him a bankruptcy sentence - something he may not have been far from anyway.
It's not just corporate interests that are represented - big farmers, plenty of rich individuals, anybody with the time, money and desire to have a voice in Washington has one.
Unfortunately, the majority of the population can barely afford to take their annual 2 week vacation in Washington D.C., and even if they took that step, they are out-competed by the lobbyists who have setup multi-story office buildings inside the beltway devoted to bending their representatives' ears.
We can write e-mails, but somehow that feels ineffective when compared to lobbyists who sponsor first class travel and entertainment to help make their point.
Simple, until you go to define "take in" - then the rules, exceptions, traditions, auditors, lawyers and the rest of 'em can jump right back into the game.
As an individual working for a paycheck, you are, by tradition, screwed. That paycheck is your income.
A company that mines bauxite and charges $473 million per year to their customers for raw ore, might spend $453 million a year on machinery, energy, and personnel. If you tax them $71 million a year in taxes, they will either have to pass that on to their customers, or vertically integrate with the customer so the transaction is no longer "tax exposed..."
This sounds like a great idea as long as it also makes the system more fair by optimizing out the tax cuts for the rich.
Ah, but your attitude is part of the problem. Simplification is change, redistributing the tax burden is change, change costs political capital, and nobody has enough political capital to simplify AND rebalance the tax code at the same time.
Or, we could just make it a flat tax with no exceptions.
No such thing (as no exceptions.)
Do we tax gross receipts, or profit? Profit is an imaginary construct that is only defined by rules - rules that could become as complex as the tax code itself.
So, tax gross receipts - at what level? Retail, wholesale, personal income, goods, services, inheritance, barter? Again, all are imaginary constructs defined by rules - make the rules simple and new imaginary constructs will pop up to circumvent the simple rules.
It's like any written definition, it starts out to the effect of "I know it when I see it," and grows from there.
If the U.S.A. is to survive for another couple of centuries, it is going to need a functioning system for purging of the laws, especially now that they are being written and passed as documents that require a team of people months to analyze even superficially.
Think about it: when you walk into a restaurant and buy a meal, do you deliberately buy more than you can afford? Repeatedly? For decades? And then go to your boss and say "I demand a raise because I spent too much"?
Most politicians are not in for decades, and even the ones who are have no accountability for their actions.
If you could walk into that restaurant with 534 of your friends, order what you like, and know that the restaurant will accept 60 cents on the dollar because without your business it would have to close, what would you do?
When I say 'all profits', I mean all profits, no exceptions.
Ah, but you have not defined profits.
Profits are monies received, less expenses.
Assuming you can even get a fair accounting of monies received, how do you define expenses?
I once had a CEO who boasted that he was "the lowest paid employee in the company." Of course, in addition to his salary, the company paid for his smartphone, car (new lease every 2 years), fuel, most meals (he liked steakhouses), his apartment (on Miami Beach), and likely his clothes and other "business related expenses." This, in addition to a hefty stock incentive that would have translated to 10 years of the highest paid employee's salary if he had made remotely good on his projections of success.
He was small-time, the big boys expense Citation jets.
Profit is that money which the executives choose not to spend. This, more than anything, is what is wrong with "tax on profits."
In the movie business, any actor with negotiating power demands royalties as a percentage of receipts, not profits. The studio can always make profits disappear.
And such exemptions to the tax code have to be voted on their own, not as an amedment to any other bill, period.
This ^^^ granularity in voting, would create transparency, and allow people to judge their elected officials based on their actions, leading to accountability in politics.
What politician is going to vote for that?
No, everybody knows they're getting screwed, what they don't know is how much their politically connected neighbors are getting away with.
Trifles, a computer is handling it, 100 or 10,000, no big deal.
They call it Monte-Carlo simulation for a reason....
but I have been assured that a computer could do this in a snap
Yes, a computer can do this, just let me write the code and show you the results...
No
Absolutely incorrect - it could be done. The better question is "can it be done without making things worse than they already are?" In an ideal world, again, the answer is yes. In the world we live in, the outcome is uncertain, and turning politicians loose on a new adventure doesn't usually go well.
The problem is in "doing it" in the best interests of the whole (or at least, a majority of) the country. As things are structured now, "key players" have entrenched themselves such that they have the politicians believing that what is good for the key players is good for the country. Short term, they may be right.
Of course, if a mugger has a gun pointed at you, short term, the better thing for you is to toss over your wallet like he asks and not make any threats that "you'll get him later."
So, the miners are, in effect, the central authorities? If the miner goes offline, then all their coin becomes unauthenticatable?
Man, if you just RTFA you'd find much bigger BS targets:
Bitcoins are created by a complex algorithm. Only 21M can be made by the year 2140. Your desktop bitcoin software can make bitcoins, but at this point the electricity and time it would take to produce a bitcoin is larger than the actual value of a bitcoin (your laptop might take five years to make one, and they currently trade at $6.70 per bitcoin [ see https://mtgox.com/trade/buy for the latest exchange rate ].
Bitcoin miners use super cheap GPUs (not CPUs) to create the coins, but as more people come online to make them, the algorithm adjusts so that one block can only be made every 10 minutes.
O.K. - logically, what algorithm would prevent duplicate hardware from making duplicate coins in 2 locations at one time? If there's no central authority, how is the one block every 10 minutes rule enforced? How will your prostitute hiring iPhone know the difference between a coin "mined" on one piece of hardware from another?
Bitcoins are virtual coins in the form of a file that is stored on your device. These coins can be sent to and from users three ways:
1. Direct with peer-to-peer software downloaded at bitcoin.org
2. Via an escrow service like ClearCoin
3. Via a bitcoin currency exchange
Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.
The benefits of a currency like this:
a) Your coins can’t be frozen (like a Paypal account can be)
b) Your coins can’t be tracked
c) Your coins can’t be taxed
d) Transaction costs are extremely low (sorry credit card companies)
Just a few reactions:
a) Not only can your coin be frozen, but any coin you transferred can also be frozen by identification of your signature - there may be a "cash economy" where bitcoin is exchanged without oversight among iPods, etc., but when it hits a regulated transaction processor, it's even worse than putting cash in the bank.
b) I'm sorry, if your signature can't be tracked, what good is it?
c) The author sorely underestimates taxing authorities, at a minimum, the government can demand that you self report transactions, much as they do for cash and similar instruments today.
d) Credit card companies' transaction costs are also extremely low...
A bacterium on the way to evolving this behaviour would almost certainly not get it right first time.
You need to get a grasp of Carl Sagan's "Billions and Billions" when thinking about bacterial evolution.
I don't know, I got an El-Al security interview in Paris at what was about 3am on my body clock. I would have rather just stood there and been patted down than answer all the questions they asked. The interview went on and on until I pointed over at my (Jewish) boss and his wife and said "Look, I'm with them." Apparently that was good enough.
That is a horribly ignorant way to look at it. Physical materials - even relatively simple ones like base elements - cannot be simply described as a mathematical value. You can say "Oh, it's element___ with this many protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, leptons, etc" but you'd still be leaving out a MASSIVE amount of data which would be required to completely describe(mathematically) the object's form and composition.
I'm pretty sure that most atomic weapon design and testing has been done by mathematical (granted, probabilistic Monte Carlo type) simulation. If the reports are to be believed, those programs describe the end result very accurately.
The patent system is expanding so quickly that no one person can ever know everything that's in there, even when focused to their field.
I'm pretty sure that in the late 1930s, the process to make Little Boy and Fat Man would have been patentable under any purview that considered any kind of patents to be valid.
And, in the end, all they are is the bringing together of big lumps of elementary material, albeit highly refined from what is found in nature, to bring about a reaction that, itself (after decades of study), can now be reduced to a set of mathematical equations.
As for software patents, some wiener patented the use of XOR to draw a cursor... if that can stand, why not anything else, like one-click order taking?
I truly hope we have hit bottom of the patent well, but I'm sure there's an army of attorneys out there willing to dig with ever sharper tools.