Please, explain why people need all this navigation. I simply don't understand it. I can start any place in the continental United States, refer to Rand McNally
As you asked: The fact that I 'can' plan a route and follow it doesn't mean I'm any smarter if I choose to do that instead of allowing a device to do it. I don't see handing over simple tasks like route planning for a car to a device as dumbing down. It frees up the nominal amount of attention that it requires and lets me use it to be even more aware of the road and traffic around me. It also routes me around heavy traffic, accidents and road closures without me having to stop.
I've also never got the strange pride about being able to follow roads. Like it is somehow a tough task to be proud of mastering. Any muppet can drive 500 miles along interstates. It's a lot easier to get from the beginning of the M6 in London to the Inverness than it would be to get from a terraced domestic area on one side of a reasonably sized city to another in the UK due to the one way networks, pedestrianised zones, bus lanes and minor roadworks.
Apple aren't volunteering to pay more taxes; they are using their size to threaten local government to give them a tax break or face financial collapse if Appele leave. A small business or individual doesn't have the size to get this by threatening so they are forced to pay full tax (which includes making up for Apple's discount). Thus you have an area that is subsidising a massively wealthy company by increased taxation on small businesses.
The issue with this argument is that it sounds all well and good until you consider it for a few seconds. Apple gets a rebate now that it is a billion dollar company but if a new 'Apple' was starting out today they'd have to pay the full rate of tax. Big companies are pitting cities up against each other in the prisoner dilemma to keep a tax rebate which means that taxes on everything else have to be higher to make up for the discount.
Apple makes a huge profit margin and pays very little tax. There's no reason at all why society benefits from giving them a rebate they really don't need; in fact it hurts society by increasing tax on others. The only reason they can have a rebate is that they've got big enough they can threaten municipalities with oblivion if they leave which is a pretty shitty situation imo.
If the situation is ripe for anarchy then the people who want it for naive, but well-intended, reasons before hand aren't the people you should be worried about. Anarchy leaves a massive power vacuum which tends to be filled by the most dangerous and unscrupulous people.
Anarchy originally meant 'absence of a ruler' by definition it isn't anarchy if you are forced to accept someone as having control over you. What a lot of people want is very, very small and usually local governance and they think that means anarchy
Is the site really a serious thing though? Unless the site is actually holding the BTC is eskrow and the assassin trusts them then why on earth would you take the job and expect to get paid. What's to stop any jackass from claiming they killed Obama if some other group of crazy racists or some such did it? Call me old fashioned but if I ever wanted someone killed then I can't imagine how a site like this would look remotely appealing as a way to go about it.
But politicians have, and want, to been seen doing something. They can't invade the family/friend unit without doing something unpopular so they make a lot of noise, and show a lot of activity, regarding the small fraction that is left. I'm not going to spell out the social demographics but the chances of abuse in a household vary by orders of magnitude based on certain factors (I won't spell them out because I don't want this to become a debate about those factors). Offering more help in protecting children in the highest risk demographics would help far more children than this BS. But then so would treating child porn down-loaders as criminals and offering them support; though obviously as society has deemed them all to be monsters you'd get more support to throwing them into a pit with Lions than to monitoring there internet and offering them psychological help.
The country with the 5th highest level of child brides is overwhelmingly Christian (80%). Two of the top 4 include a considerable Christian population which participate in child marriage. Child marriage is obviously a big issue in some Islamic countries, but only the ill-informed or racist, wouldn't be aware that child marriage has been common in many religions and is often present because it was common in countries prior to conversion to the worlds major religions.
Neither Google or Microsoft wanted to do this. They did it after they were threatened. If they hadn't done this then the British government intended to pass legislation requiring them to do something (which could, and likely would, have been even worse from a censorship perspective). I doubt either company has any expectation that this will 'solve' the issue of child pornography online.
Most people making below minimum wage are effectively trainees, or live with their parents, or use the job as a second job or second income in a family.
People aren't earning below the minimum wage (unless they are employed by a company breaking the law) so no they aren't any of those things. You can't pretend that the minimum wage is somehow artificially manipulating the job market when the government is willing to subsidise people with low earnings because the market is already manipulated.
Nearly 20% of UK households receive housing benefit. Nothing like 20% of UK households are entirely unemployed so your world view where the only low paid workers are trainees, living with parents or working for shits and giggles is nothing more than a fiction you seemed to have confused with reality.
This story has to be one of the strangest freedom-zealot / anti-tory circle jerks I've seen in a while. Someone changed the robots.txt on their website so that it didn't include a folder. Maybe it's just me but that doesn't sound like an amazing story. Has there been any reporting so far that they wanted to, or even knew, that the internet archive would delete the content because it retrospectively respects robots.txt?
Personally I find it disappointing that a political party is making it harder to find speeches they have given in the past but it's hardly criminal to slightly amend a website. If anything this just highlights that the internet archive handles robots.txt is a pretty stupid way; or that if we want to stop people vanishing stuff from the internet then we shouldn't be relying on them to keep the information up themselves.
Can anyone find a copy of Tony Blair's speech justifying the Iraq war on the Labour website via searching on google? Can anyone find the transcript of Gordon Brown calling a voter a bigot (I'd also accept the audio) on the Labour website?..
European grocery stores already don't have baggers or shopping cart attendants. Raise the cost of hiring further, and you're going to see more self-checkout. Go even higher, and grocery stores are going to move to RFID checkout. Even higher, and they are going to go to stores based on fully robotic warehousing systems.
That's all absolutely true, but it isn't a flaw of the minimum wage. The minimum wage should be around the level at which someone is earning enough to live a reasonable life in the country without requiring considerable government subsidy. There's no point in subsidising people doing work that pays half what they need to live when what we should be doing is helping them find, and be capable of doing, work that pays better.
We'll see more self-service in UK supermarkets whether wages increase or not. The tech is getting cheaper, younger people like them more than older people, they are becoming more reliable. Should we drop UK checkout wages by 5% a year to counter-act this and stop check-out jobs being lost? Or should we embrace the fact that tens of thousands of people in the UK are capable of being more than glorified barcode scanners, automate that work and employ them doing something more useful for a better wage?
Odd. I think about what I read; chewing over ideas, determining their truth, rejecting or integrating them into the harmonious whole worldview.
There is some truth to his point and a flaw to your assertion. If all someone does is read information that fits a certain perspective then it is likely to, over time, distort their world-view. This is less likely to happen if the opinion goes entirely against your own position as you will see and resent 'the bias'. That's part of the reason why people think minorities commit more crime than they really do; papers have over-reported on crimes by minorities and highlighted the race of minorities more than the majority. We aren't looking for the bias so when we read the news it creates a conscious ("bloody Muslims always committing crimes") or unconscious ("I feel less safe around here" (because your mind is equating all the people around you with the criminals it has seen on the news) bias.
You can try and minimise this, and I'm sure you do, but I don't think anyone is entirely immune to it. Sometimes you benefit from reading material which challenges your opinion on an issue as it challenges that accumulated bias.
I'll respond to you even though it is really to respond to the ignorant ACs because I don't want to draw attention to them. I haven't read 'Atlas Shrugged' and I'm dubious about it; for that reason I resist the urge to attack it.
There seems to be some nonsensical snobbery that says I won't read it because it's a) nonsense and/or b) too simple. I don't understand why people who say that think it makes them look good. To me they look incredibly naive. The book is incredibly popular and influential, and has devotees within very influential parts of society. Why wouldn't you want to read it yourself so that you can both know what it really says and better understand what it is that people like about it.
I also entirely agree with your concise suggestion on retiring from political commentary if you just want to mimic other people's points without understanding them.
How could the native americans have a society for centuries without a concept of wealth and currency?
Very easily, though I expect they still had the equivalent of wealth they just wouldn't of defined it as the person with the most metal discs. Though it's an irrelevant question as the original, naive, question was why shouldn't everything be free. I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that if buying a loaf of bread didn't cost £1 any more but instead you could exchange it for 5 hours work it was 'free' doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.
But what I can say is that if my hard work is now "free", then I won't work hard anymore.
And if my house is free, my utilities are free, my food is free etc I have no reason to spend time working producing anything of value when I can consume things, take holidays and read more instead.
The only way everything will ever be free is if there is nothing.
I would suggest that you read up considerably more and then by all means come to your own conclusion; but clearly you aren't well educated on Northern Ireland. The IRA were well armed; there is ample evidence of this in both weapon seizures and the intelligence that has been made public. Ireland is not fully sovereign so they were not fighting to keep it sovereign. America's view and actions towards the IRA changed considerably after 9/11 when they got a taste of what being on the receiving end of terrorism is like.
As to comparing it to the revolutionary war. The war started because Britain wanted to tax America without giving it any political power "no taxation without representation" which is not the situation in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has political parties, it has had referendums and has a population that is vastly in favour of remaining within the UK. The UK is not adverse to the idea of Northern Ireland unifying with Ireland, but only if that is the wish of the Northern Irish, we've got a Scottish referendum for independence next year after all so it's not like when America attacked itself because the south wanted freedom in the civil war;) Just before the revolutionary war around 40% of the US population were Patriots and around 20% were Loyalists, that means that more of the population wanted independence. That's clearly not the case in Northern Ireland.
I'm English. That means that my money goes to subsidising Northern Ireland (which raises less in tax than it receives in funding). It means that I've lived in a country subjected to terrorist attacks for decades. There's no benefit to me directly in Northern Ireland remaining British but as long as that's what the Northern Irish want it would be wrong for us to abandon them.
- Lastly replace the broken "First Past The Goalpost" with a run-off voting system.
We actually had a referendum in the UK about AV which is a step away from pure FPTP. We, the voters, overwhelming rejected it because we a) have a misplaced pride and are arrogant when it comes to our political system and b) we didn't like one of the leaders who was pro-AV at the time. That's right, a significant proportion of, the electorate chose to reject a more representative voting method and a change to our democracy for life because we don't like one politician.
I really wish we would lose the them and us mentality, and that it was simple, but I think that's a major ask. When the majority of the electorate doesn't want to be informed about politics you're pretty much fucked.
Welcome to democracy. I'm not even sure many of the politicians believe this kind of nonsense but god forbid voters think of you as being soft on criminals or ineffective at fighting terrorists.
The average UK citizen will accept, or in fact welcome, pretty much any kind of invasion of privacy by the state if it doesn't inconvenience them in going about their day to day life. So we probably shouldn't be lumping all the blame on politicians for expressing views that match us.
The media also deserves considerable blame. We went through decades of terrorism with the IRA a group that was massively more dangerous, coordinated and smarter than the radicalised Islamists that threaten us now and we carried on regardless. Look up the 1996 Manchester bombing, which I remember vividly, and you'll see how dangerous they were and how recently. But we didn't throw away all our rights and privacy to fight it and we rebuilt the area better than it was before as a massive 'fuck you' to the scum bags that did it. Why are we so afraid of the idiots they call terrorists these days? Because the media constantly barrages us with stories about plots, dangers, threats from around the world like it's some kind of miracle that I've survived the last week.
That's the general idea behind American Conservatism.
True, and it doesn't work. America is massively to the right of Europe and I'd take the government, laws etc of almost any European country over America. There will always be people who wield power, if you have weak government then you don't automatically become more free; you just end up being controlled by someone else who you certainly didn't get vote for.
In that case, the police take a different mindset, and that mindset is the scary one (probably because the police don't have respect for them at that point).
Police behaviour towards protesters has nothing to do with how serious the police think the cause is; it might, potentially, vary depending on whether the police agree with the cause. Just look at how the protests against racism have been policed to see how false your statement is, unless you're suggesting that the people protesting against racism didn't believe in it.
The definition of caring about something isn't whether you are willing to go to prison or not; nor should it be because that's a stupid definition. Getting arrested for cause, actually breaking a law, isn't going to get you or your cause sympathy. Given policing and prosecutors these days it could get you a criminal record and screw you for life though. If the police arrest you on trumped up charges and you can prove it then maybe it'll help the cause you support.
We don't park gunboats off the coast of countries that disagree with us any more and we don't need to be violent or criminal in order to protest an issue either.
You write the patch and just before you hit submit, you realize "Oh wait, I could get paid for this" so you create a $1 bribe for said bug, wait until it have some dollars more, then submit and cash out.
I'm not sure it's a real world issue. Firstly is someone who has already decided to code a fix without any prospect of getting paid suddenly going to change their mind after designing a fix to potentially earn a few pounds; even if they did then someone else might see the bounty and claim it before they does meaning their coding was wasted and they don't get anything.
Paid for software already exists. The fact that someone could go and work for a firm making paid for software already doesn't stop 1,000s of people working on open source software for free.
You've got it backwards (you're responding to a post about keeping the upper value in check not the lower value). Some people claim bitcoin value is limited by power cost because if the value exceeds the cost of mining then more coins will be mined. Tha t's flawed on two levels:
1/ Bitcoins can be produced for free by anyone using computing power without permission (botnets etc).
2/ If a bitcoin is worth $100 then the fact that a machine designed for mining can create them for $90 won't magically make the price fall. Most people won't have super efficient, and expensive mining rigs so it would still be cheaper for them to buy one for $100 than it would be to mine one on a standard pc. I've heard people suggest that miners will create more and sell them which will drop the market rate but why would I sell a bitcoin worth $100 for the equivalent of $99 when I could either hold onto it, buy something worth $100 etc?
Bitcoin is fascinating to watch but I still don't regret my decision to stay out of it thus far. Yes I'd have made considerable money if I got in early but I still think the decision to stay out was the right one given what I knew at the time.
Taxes are nothing more than immoral, but legalized thievery.
Nonsense. An American who doesn't like the tax rules in America would find it trivially easy to migrate to another country with different rules. You can't credibly choose to abide in a country, create a company in that country and use the infrastructure of that country then claim it is theft when you are asked to pay the taxes that they require.
But no "great man" owes back to society more, just because his creation turned out to be more valuable,
There is an idea, the name of which I cannot recall now, based on just this. If you asked a rich person, a poor person, a white person, a woman or a catholic to write the rules, laws and taxes then what you'd end up with would probably be something that suits them better than it suits other demographics. If you asked someone to write the rules without knowing who they would be (obviously a thought experiment) then they'd want to ensure that the disabled, people from impoverished families etc were assisted (in case they ended up being in that group) and would be happy to risk sacrificing some income if they turned out to be from a well connected, wealthy family with a high chance of earning a large income.
Slashdot Mirror
As you asked: The fact that I 'can' plan a route and follow it doesn't mean I'm any smarter if I choose to do that instead of allowing a device to do it. I don't see handing over simple tasks like route planning for a car to a device as dumbing down. It frees up the nominal amount of attention that it requires and lets me use it to be even more aware of the road and traffic around me. It also routes me around heavy traffic, accidents and road closures without me having to stop.
I've also never got the strange pride about being able to follow roads. Like it is somehow a tough task to be proud of mastering. Any muppet can drive 500 miles along interstates. It's a lot easier to get from the beginning of the M6 in London to the Inverness than it would be to get from a terraced domestic area on one side of a reasonably sized city to another in the UK due to the one way networks, pedestrianised zones, bus lanes and minor roadworks.
Apple aren't volunteering to pay more taxes; they are using their size to threaten local government to give them a tax break or face financial collapse if Appele leave. A small business or individual doesn't have the size to get this by threatening so they are forced to pay full tax (which includes making up for Apple's discount). Thus you have an area that is subsidising a massively wealthy company by increased taxation on small businesses.
The issue with this argument is that it sounds all well and good until you consider it for a few seconds. Apple gets a rebate now that it is a billion dollar company but if a new 'Apple' was starting out today they'd have to pay the full rate of tax. Big companies are pitting cities up against each other in the prisoner dilemma to keep a tax rebate which means that taxes on everything else have to be higher to make up for the discount.
Apple makes a huge profit margin and pays very little tax. There's no reason at all why society benefits from giving them a rebate they really don't need; in fact it hurts society by increasing tax on others. The only reason they can have a rebate is that they've got big enough they can threaten municipalities with oblivion if they leave which is a pretty shitty situation imo.
If the situation is ripe for anarchy then the people who want it for naive, but well-intended, reasons before hand aren't the people you should be worried about. Anarchy leaves a massive power vacuum which tends to be filled by the most dangerous and unscrupulous people.
Anarchy originally meant 'absence of a ruler' by definition it isn't anarchy if you are forced to accept someone as having control over you. What a lot of people want is very, very small and usually local governance and they think that means anarchy
Is the site really a serious thing though? Unless the site is actually holding the BTC is eskrow and the assassin trusts them then why on earth would you take the job and expect to get paid. What's to stop any jackass from claiming they killed Obama if some other group of crazy racists or some such did it? Call me old fashioned but if I ever wanted someone killed then I can't imagine how a site like this would look remotely appealing as a way to go about it.
But politicians have, and want, to been seen doing something. They can't invade the family/friend unit without doing something unpopular so they make a lot of noise, and show a lot of activity, regarding the small fraction that is left. I'm not going to spell out the social demographics but the chances of abuse in a household vary by orders of magnitude based on certain factors (I won't spell them out because I don't want this to become a debate about those factors). Offering more help in protecting children in the highest risk demographics would help far more children than this BS. But then so would treating child porn down-loaders as criminals and offering them support; though obviously as society has deemed them all to be monsters you'd get more support to throwing them into a pit with Lions than to monitoring there internet and offering them psychological help.
Obvious troll is obvious.
The country with the 5th highest level of child brides is overwhelmingly Christian (80%). Two of the top 4 include a considerable Christian population which participate in child marriage. Child marriage is obviously a big issue in some Islamic countries, but only the ill-informed or racist, wouldn't be aware that child marriage has been common in many religions and is often present because it was common in countries prior to conversion to the worlds major religions.
Neither Google or Microsoft wanted to do this. They did it after they were threatened. If they hadn't done this then the British government intended to pass legislation requiring them to do something (which could, and likely would, have been even worse from a censorship perspective). I doubt either company has any expectation that this will 'solve' the issue of child pornography online.
People aren't earning below the minimum wage (unless they are employed by a company breaking the law) so no they aren't any of those things. You can't pretend that the minimum wage is somehow artificially manipulating the job market when the government is willing to subsidise people with low earnings because the market is already manipulated.
Nearly 20% of UK households receive housing benefit. Nothing like 20% of UK households are entirely unemployed so your world view where the only low paid workers are trainees, living with parents or working for shits and giggles is nothing more than a fiction you seemed to have confused with reality.
This story has to be one of the strangest freedom-zealot / anti-tory circle jerks I've seen in a while. Someone changed the robots.txt on their website so that it didn't include a folder. Maybe it's just me but that doesn't sound like an amazing story. Has there been any reporting so far that they wanted to, or even knew, that the internet archive would delete the content because it retrospectively respects robots.txt?
Personally I find it disappointing that a political party is making it harder to find speeches they have given in the past but it's hardly criminal to slightly amend a website. If anything this just highlights that the internet archive handles robots.txt is a pretty stupid way; or that if we want to stop people vanishing stuff from the internet then we shouldn't be relying on them to keep the information up themselves.
Can anyone find a copy of Tony Blair's speech justifying the Iraq war on the Labour website via searching on google? Can anyone find the transcript of Gordon Brown calling a voter a bigot (I'd also accept the audio) on the Labour website?..
There is some truth to his point and a flaw to your assertion. If all someone does is read information that fits a certain perspective then it is likely to, over time, distort their world-view. This is less likely to happen if the opinion goes entirely against your own position as you will see and resent 'the bias'. That's part of the reason why people think minorities commit more crime than they really do; papers have over-reported on crimes by minorities and highlighted the race of minorities more than the majority. We aren't looking for the bias so when we read the news it creates a conscious ("bloody Muslims always committing crimes") or unconscious ("I feel less safe around here" (because your mind is equating all the people around you with the criminals it has seen on the news) bias.
You can try and minimise this, and I'm sure you do, but I don't think anyone is entirely immune to it. Sometimes you benefit from reading material which challenges your opinion on an issue as it challenges that accumulated bias.
I'll respond to you even though it is really to respond to the ignorant ACs because I don't want to draw attention to them. I haven't read 'Atlas Shrugged' and I'm dubious about it; for that reason I resist the urge to attack it.
There seems to be some nonsensical snobbery that says I won't read it because it's a) nonsense and/or b) too simple. I don't understand why people who say that think it makes them look good. To me they look incredibly naive. The book is incredibly popular and influential, and has devotees within very influential parts of society. Why wouldn't you want to read it yourself so that you can both know what it really says and better understand what it is that people like about it.
I also entirely agree with your concise suggestion on retiring from political commentary if you just want to mimic other people's points without understanding them.
Very easily, though I expect they still had the equivalent of wealth they just wouldn't of defined it as the person with the most metal discs. Though it's an irrelevant question as the original, naive, question was why shouldn't everything be free. I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that if buying a loaf of bread didn't cost £1 any more but instead you could exchange it for 5 hours work it was 'free' doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.
And if my house is free, my utilities are free, my food is free etc I have no reason to spend time working producing anything of value when I can consume things, take holidays and read more instead.
The only way everything will ever be free is if there is nothing.
I would suggest that you read up considerably more and then by all means come to your own conclusion; but clearly you aren't well educated on Northern Ireland. The IRA were well armed; there is ample evidence of this in both weapon seizures and the intelligence that has been made public. Ireland is not fully sovereign so they were not fighting to keep it sovereign. America's view and actions towards the IRA changed considerably after 9/11 when they got a taste of what being on the receiving end of terrorism is like.
;) Just before the revolutionary war around 40% of the US population were Patriots and around 20% were Loyalists, that means that more of the population wanted independence. That's clearly not the case in Northern Ireland.
As to comparing it to the revolutionary war. The war started because Britain wanted to tax America without giving it any political power "no taxation without representation" which is not the situation in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has political parties, it has had referendums and has a population that is vastly in favour of remaining within the UK. The UK is not adverse to the idea of Northern Ireland unifying with Ireland, but only if that is the wish of the Northern Irish, we've got a Scottish referendum for independence next year after all so it's not like when America attacked itself because the south wanted freedom in the civil war
I'm English. That means that my money goes to subsidising Northern Ireland (which raises less in tax than it receives in funding). It means that I've lived in a country subjected to terrorist attacks for decades. There's no benefit to me directly in Northern Ireland remaining British but as long as that's what the Northern Irish want it would be wrong for us to abandon them.
We actually had a referendum in the UK about AV which is a step away from pure FPTP. We, the voters, overwhelming rejected it because we a) have a misplaced pride and are arrogant when it comes to our political system and b) we didn't like one of the leaders who was pro-AV at the time. That's right, a significant proportion of, the electorate chose to reject a more representative voting method and a change to our democracy for life because we don't like one politician.
I really wish we would lose the them and us mentality, and that it was simple, but I think that's a major ask. When the majority of the electorate doesn't want to be informed about politics you're pretty much fucked.
Welcome to democracy. I'm not even sure many of the politicians believe this kind of nonsense but god forbid voters think of you as being soft on criminals or ineffective at fighting terrorists.
The average UK citizen will accept, or in fact welcome, pretty much any kind of invasion of privacy by the state if it doesn't inconvenience them in going about their day to day life. So we probably shouldn't be lumping all the blame on politicians for expressing views that match us.
The media also deserves considerable blame. We went through decades of terrorism with the IRA a group that was massively more dangerous, coordinated and smarter than the radicalised Islamists that threaten us now and we carried on regardless. Look up the 1996 Manchester bombing, which I remember vividly, and you'll see how dangerous they were and how recently. But we didn't throw away all our rights and privacy to fight it and we rebuilt the area better than it was before as a massive 'fuck you' to the scum bags that did it. Why are we so afraid of the idiots they call terrorists these days? Because the media constantly barrages us with stories about plots, dangers, threats from around the world like it's some kind of miracle that I've survived the last week.
True, and it doesn't work. America is massively to the right of Europe and I'd take the government, laws etc of almost any European country over America. There will always be people who wield power, if you have weak government then you don't automatically become more free; you just end up being controlled by someone else who you certainly didn't get vote for.
Only person here looking like a douche is you with posts like that.
Police behaviour towards protesters has nothing to do with how serious the police think the cause is; it might, potentially, vary depending on whether the police agree with the cause. Just look at how the protests against racism have been policed to see how false your statement is, unless you're suggesting that the people protesting against racism didn't believe in it.
The definition of caring about something isn't whether you are willing to go to prison or not; nor should it be because that's a stupid definition. Getting arrested for cause, actually breaking a law, isn't going to get you or your cause sympathy. Given policing and prosecutors these days it could get you a criminal record and screw you for life though. If the police arrest you on trumped up charges and you can prove it then maybe it'll help the cause you support.
We don't park gunboats off the coast of countries that disagree with us any more and we don't need to be violent or criminal in order to protest an issue either.
Such. A. Good. Game. Shame Rare spends most of their time building avatar clothes for Xbox rather than producing awesome games now.
I'm not sure it's a real world issue. Firstly is someone who has already decided to code a fix without any prospect of getting paid suddenly going to change their mind after designing a fix to potentially earn a few pounds; even if they did then someone else might see the bounty and claim it before they does meaning their coding was wasted and they don't get anything.
Paid for software already exists. The fact that someone could go and work for a firm making paid for software already doesn't stop 1,000s of people working on open source software for free.
You've got it backwards (you're responding to a post about keeping the upper value in check not the lower value). Some people claim bitcoin value is limited by power cost because if the value exceeds the cost of mining then more coins will be mined. Tha t's flawed on two levels:
1/ Bitcoins can be produced for free by anyone using computing power without permission (botnets etc).
2/ If a bitcoin is worth $100 then the fact that a machine designed for mining can create them for $90 won't magically make the price fall. Most people won't have super efficient, and expensive mining rigs so it would still be cheaper for them to buy one for $100 than it would be to mine one on a standard pc. I've heard people suggest that miners will create more and sell them which will drop the market rate but why would I sell a bitcoin worth $100 for the equivalent of $99 when I could either hold onto it, buy something worth $100 etc?
Bitcoin is fascinating to watch but I still don't regret my decision to stay out of it thus far. Yes I'd have made considerable money if I got in early but I still think the decision to stay out was the right one given what I knew at the time.
Nonsense. An American who doesn't like the tax rules in America would find it trivially easy to migrate to another country with different rules. You can't credibly choose to abide in a country, create a company in that country and use the infrastructure of that country then claim it is theft when you are asked to pay the taxes that they require.
There is an idea, the name of which I cannot recall now, based on just this. If you asked a rich person, a poor person, a white person, a woman or a catholic to write the rules, laws and taxes then what you'd end up with would probably be something that suits them better than it suits other demographics. If you asked someone to write the rules without knowing who they would be (obviously a thought experiment) then they'd want to ensure that the disabled, people from impoverished families etc were assisted (in case they ended up being in that group) and would be happy to risk sacrificing some income if they turned out to be from a well connected, wealthy family with a high chance of earning a large income.