Except making money is the only objective indicator of what is useful or not. If it wasn't useful (or rather, more useful than the next best alternative), that person wouldn't have spent their money on that labor, now would they? Profit literally means taking scarce, valuable resources, and making them more valuable (otherwise, you're taking resources that are worth something, and making them less valuable, i.e. taking a loss, not a good thing obviously).
Someone is going to make the money, yes. So while people are making money, would you rather have volatile markets with wide spreads, or more stable prices, with a highly liquid, small bid-ask spread? It's a no-brainer, I think. Arguing against new technology just because horse and buggy companies are going to go out of business is no sound argument at all.
Actually it is rather clear in US courts, there isn't a single court case I'm aware of that has ruled a program as a derivative work of a library it uses, there are plenty of them that have struck that down, however.
Does it make a difference that you didn't actually modify the source code to combine the original program into your larger work?
In copyright law, no, because the copied code might not be licensed for such redistribution, so long as that work can actually be copyrighted and is not strictly necessary as an integral part of the work (i.e. code for the purpose of stopping inter-operability instead of as a creative literary work, which is what computer code falls under).
Does merely linking to a program without any change to the original source code create a derivative work of that program?
No it does not, you can make a clean-room rewrite of logic that otherwise copies an API, and that does not qualify as a derivative work, see Computer Associates Int. Inc. v. Altai Inc.. If you are allowed to distribute the linked library with the program is another matter (the GPL prohibits it, the LGPL allows it).
When you buy low and sell high, that stabilizes prices. Since High Frequencies Traders are profitable, they therefore contribute to the stability of the market. And in fact, the bid-ask spread has in fact closed significantly as a result. Speculators and arbitrageurs are no different, so long as they're profitable. (And if you're not profitable, it's not long before you fall out of the market anyways, there's no need to police it.)
I don't understand the point, do you confuse demand with quantity demanded? And in what world does producing clothes from new fabric become cheaper than the process of producing clean clothes? Even if somehow daily shipments to your doorstep became cheaper than throwing it in a washing machine, there's other disposable goods to look to, the concept of one-use goods isn't anything new. Once we reach the point where people are buying new food every day, where do you go from there? We already do, and food isn't produced that much differently than cotton is: We consume (buy, farm, or whatever) food until we decide that our resources (namely, money or time) are better spent elsewhere.
But my point is labor is a renewable resource, not something that is used up or grown into, it makes no sense to say it could "peak".
Do you have any clue what peak oil even is? Or what a logistic model of growth is, and why grows exponentially first and then slopes off as the marginal cost of growth increases?
Human labor is not inhibited like population growth, or it's first-derivative cousin natural resource extraction, because there's a fixed amount of it at any given time. If there's a decrease in demand for labor, then the price of it falls until the quantity demanded matches the quantity supplied. If that sounds scary, what that means is that our standard of living increases, since we can produce more things with the same amount of labor -- hardly a bad thing.
Cryptography, economics, computer science, peer-to-peer networking, scientific research, I mean, if Bitcoin isn't News for Nerds you need to explain to me what is.
Perceived distance in stereoscopic imagery is determined by where your eyes cross, if they're not parallel. Infinity is when the parallax, the distance between the position on the left- and right-eye images, is 85mm apart (the distance between your eyes). On a small screen the actual number that represents infinity is going to be smaller, and thus appear at some finite distance between your eyes, and in the movie theater it could potentially be greater than 85mm, meaning... farther than infinity somehow (your eyes are looking away from each other instead of looking in parallel directions or crossing).
The more money one entity has, the less money everyone else has.
So what? Money is not wealth. The richest person in the world in 1800 still couldn't afford air conditioning. What does it matter who is getting how much wealthier, so long as everyone is? Someone can't become rich without benefiting someone else in the process, so I don't see the problem.
"Trickle Down Economics" has proven not to work
What part of "Hey let's not tax away the assets of the producers of our society" has been proven not to work? "Trickle down" (hey let's not take money from people who are profitable) is not the same as government subsidies (hey let's take money from people and fund unprofitable ventures instead).
There's this cool thing called supply and demand that raises and lowers market prices until supply matches demand. You do realize that there's not whole lot you can do with cash itself, sitting on money doesn't actually make anyone richer in the present, yes? So if someone's saving money, it's because they're expecting it to be worth more in the future than it is worth to them right now. Taxing it away and then having the government spend it only hurts private investment.
They should not be. How do you prove that a particular person was the person who clicked on "I Agree?" It is not like you have a copy of a contract, with the person's signature on it.
They can't be, because it's not in exchange for anything -- you've already bought the product, you own it free and clear, so violation of the EULA would not be theft of anything.
I never implied anything about private corporations and for-profit groups, but whatever they want to do is up to them, it's their money, and they're not the ones setting public policy.
It's called the Arizona employer sanctions law, which the Supreme Court just upheld the constitutionality of.
And personally, I can't imagine a bigger attack on capitalism than raiding businesses just because they decided to hire someone looking for a job, regardless of the legality of their presence in the country.
There's more properties than that, but mostly common sense stuff: It must be homogeneous, divisible, it can't deteriorate or spoil, and the quantity of the money supply or the number on the money is meaningless except to the extent that it becomes impractical to use, which is why gold is preferred over silver for storage of wealth. Bitcoin has all the same intrinsic properties that the USD has, except that its supply is predefined. The apparent difference in its ability to store value isn't necessarily true, but just circumstantially, it's caused by the much broader market that the USD has for goods, than Bitcoin does.
The Bitcoin difficulty is adjusted for increased hardware, calculated so that blocks are calculated an average of one per ten minutes except for a minimum difficulty, and there was a minimum difficulty in effect for the first year or so. Your concern can't possibly be over the initial difficulty, but the fact that those payouts went to such a small group. But there's nothing wrong with this, they're also taking on massive risk. We thought it was a bubble at $0.06/Bitcoin! Initial investors are still holding onto their coin, there was no sell-off that caused a crash. The bubble happened when it broke $20 USD/Bitcoin, the value only fell to $15 before settling back at about $20. Why was there a mining explosion? Miners aren't stupid, some of the most serious software analysis I've seen is behind mining programs and deciding when to mine, and when it's too expensive, and how to maximize efficiency, and so forth. The amount of power put behind the network is proportional to the trading price within an order of magnitude -- By comparison, the actual network power has increased what, 3-4 orders of magnitude?
And I'm not aware of any current bubble, over-the-counter trading is holding between $13-$16 in the last few days.
Which by the way is exactly why we use money, i.e. secondary exchange, and not barter: Their trade value for goods commonly has the highest marginal utility, more than for another good, thus economizing exchanges, and making the economy as a whole more efficient. There's lots reasons to argue against a gold standard, but the only one that isn't fallacious is it's too useful a commodity (for aesthetic and electronic purposes) to waste as a money (counter-argument being we need a money that has such intrinsic value, so prices are tied to some useful, industrial purpose).
That bubble fell long before there was any "theft" of Bitcoin, actually. I'm watching the price ticker right now, they're still exchanging for 13-16 USD. By comparison, I started following it when the first markets were formed and traded at $0.05.
No one ever thought Bitcoin was a safe long-term store of value, that's what precious metals are for, or stocks and bonds if you're willing to take risk to grow money even more. But no one would go into a store with gold coin in their pocket and try and weigh it, nevermind an online store or website, that's ridiculous too, that's what Bitcoin was invented for.
Being greedy doesn't do anything for you, the wonderful thing about profit is it necessarily must benefit two people, because it's voluntary. (Even if later someone decides the trade was a mistake, that's a decision made in hindsight.)
Anyone with more than a high school understanding of economics also knows that the rate of price inflation is built into the interest rate. Inflation or deflation is not a problem when you know how it's going to affect prices, it only becomes a problem when it's monetary inflation or deflation (as is the case for recessions in fractional reserve economies) and is unplanned, and then prices rise or fall on you when you didn't expect them to.
It may not be polite to disregard the author's wishes, but it's certainly completely ethical. How ethical is it if I, as the author, could tell you "No you're not allowed to store that book YOU bought on anything but a coffee table for the next 20 years"? Copyright does pretty much the same thing at the point when you decide you want to make and distribute copies.
So you're basically implying no matter how rich we get, no matter how productive we are, the existence of a lower class is somehow a bad thing, or at least, is something that can be fixed without making everyone poorer in the process.
How about:
"Inequality isn't something that needs to be 'fixed'. As long as you're not being literally stolen from, you shouldn't be complaining and take advantage what you're offered."
At which point it becomes intrastate commerce, and the state's responsibility instead of the federal government's. Unlike the purposeful perversion of "interstate" trade that FDR created, that's what the constitution actually says. Regulatory powers over commerce under the Constitution is given to either the Federal government or the state, but not both. Sstates are likewise prohibited from taxing and regulating interstate trade except to control banned products coming into the state.
Slashdot Mirror
Except making money is the only objective indicator of what is useful or not. If it wasn't useful (or rather, more useful than the next best alternative), that person wouldn't have spent their money on that labor, now would they? Profit literally means taking scarce, valuable resources, and making them more valuable (otherwise, you're taking resources that are worth something, and making them less valuable, i.e. taking a loss, not a good thing obviously).
Actually, Apple literally did invent the rounded rectangle UI element: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt
Someone is going to make the money, yes. So while people are making money, would you rather have volatile markets with wide spreads, or more stable prices, with a highly liquid, small bid-ask spread? It's a no-brainer, I think. Arguing against new technology just because horse and buggy companies are going to go out of business is no sound argument at all.
Actually it is rather clear in US courts, there isn't a single court case I'm aware of that has ruled a program as a derivative work of a library it uses, there are plenty of them that have struck that down, however.
Does it make a difference that you didn't actually modify the source code to combine the original program into your larger work?
In copyright law, no, because the copied code might not be licensed for such redistribution, so long as that work can actually be copyrighted and is not strictly necessary as an integral part of the work (i.e. code for the purpose of stopping inter-operability instead of as a creative literary work, which is what computer code falls under).
Does merely linking to a program without any change to the original source code create a derivative work of that program?
No it does not, you can make a clean-room rewrite of logic that otherwise copies an API, and that does not qualify as a derivative work, see Computer Associates Int. Inc. v. Altai Inc.. If you are allowed to distribute the linked library with the program is another matter (the GPL prohibits it, the LGPL allows it).
When you buy low and sell high, that stabilizes prices. Since High Frequencies Traders are profitable, they therefore contribute to the stability of the market. And in fact, the bid-ask spread has in fact closed significantly as a result. Speculators and arbitrageurs are no different, so long as they're profitable. (And if you're not profitable, it's not long before you fall out of the market anyways, there's no need to police it.)
I don't understand the point, do you confuse demand with quantity demanded? And in what world does producing clothes from new fabric become cheaper than the process of producing clean clothes? Even if somehow daily shipments to your doorstep became cheaper than throwing it in a washing machine, there's other disposable goods to look to, the concept of one-use goods isn't anything new. Once we reach the point where people are buying new food every day, where do you go from there? We already do, and food isn't produced that much differently than cotton is: We consume (buy, farm, or whatever) food until we decide that our resources (namely, money or time) are better spent elsewhere.
But my point is labor is a renewable resource, not something that is used up or grown into, it makes no sense to say it could "peak".
Do you have any clue what peak oil even is? Or what a logistic model of growth is, and why grows exponentially first and then slopes off as the marginal cost of growth increases?
Human labor is not inhibited like population growth, or it's first-derivative cousin natural resource extraction, because there's a fixed amount of it at any given time. If there's a decrease in demand for labor, then the price of it falls until the quantity demanded matches the quantity supplied. If that sounds scary, what that means is that our standard of living increases, since we can produce more things with the same amount of labor -- hardly a bad thing.
Cryptography, economics, computer science, peer-to-peer networking, scientific research, I mean, if Bitcoin isn't News for Nerds you need to explain to me what is.
Perceived distance in stereoscopic imagery is determined by where your eyes cross, if they're not parallel. Infinity is when the parallax, the distance between the position on the left- and right-eye images, is 85mm apart (the distance between your eyes). On a small screen the actual number that represents infinity is going to be smaller, and thus appear at some finite distance between your eyes, and in the movie theater it could potentially be greater than 85mm, meaning... farther than infinity somehow (your eyes are looking away from each other instead of looking in parallel directions or crossing).
And I'm just now reading the article and it actually describes this, it's worth reading: http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/8/11.full
The more money one entity has, the less money everyone else has.
So what? Money is not wealth. The richest person in the world in 1800 still couldn't afford air conditioning. What does it matter who is getting how much wealthier, so long as everyone is? Someone can't become rich without benefiting someone else in the process, so I don't see the problem.
"Trickle Down Economics" has proven not to work
What part of "Hey let's not tax away the assets of the producers of our society" has been proven not to work? "Trickle down" (hey let's not take money from people who are profitable) is not the same as government subsidies (hey let's take money from people and fund unprofitable ventures instead).
There's this cool thing called supply and demand that raises and lowers market prices until supply matches demand. You do realize that there's not whole lot you can do with cash itself, sitting on money doesn't actually make anyone richer in the present, yes? So if someone's saving money, it's because they're expecting it to be worth more in the future than it is worth to them right now. Taxing it away and then having the government spend it only hurts private investment.
You should be able to use a magnet to trigger the sensor, apparently that has had some successes http://www.wikihow.com/Trigger-Green-Traffic-Lights
what do you think about EULAs being binding?
They should not be. How do you prove that a particular person was the person who clicked on "I Agree?" It is not like you have a copy of a contract, with the person's signature on it.
They can't be, because it's not in exchange for anything -- you've already bought the product, you own it free and clear, so violation of the EULA would not be theft of anything.
I never implied anything about private corporations and for-profit groups, but whatever they want to do is up to them, it's their money, and they're not the ones setting public policy.
You say that as if it's not immediately obvious. Since when did we trust government organizations to not politically interfere with research?
It's called the Arizona employer sanctions law, which the Supreme Court just upheld the constitutionality of.
And personally, I can't imagine a bigger attack on capitalism than raiding businesses just because they decided to hire someone looking for a job, regardless of the legality of their presence in the country.
There's more properties than that, but mostly common sense stuff: It must be homogeneous, divisible, it can't deteriorate or spoil, and the quantity of the money supply or the number on the money is meaningless except to the extent that it becomes impractical to use, which is why gold is preferred over silver for storage of wealth. Bitcoin has all the same intrinsic properties that the USD has, except that its supply is predefined. The apparent difference in its ability to store value isn't necessarily true, but just circumstantially, it's caused by the much broader market that the USD has for goods, than Bitcoin does.
The Bitcoin difficulty is adjusted for increased hardware, calculated so that blocks are calculated an average of one per ten minutes except for a minimum difficulty, and there was a minimum difficulty in effect for the first year or so. Your concern can't possibly be over the initial difficulty, but the fact that those payouts went to such a small group. But there's nothing wrong with this, they're also taking on massive risk. We thought it was a bubble at $0.06/Bitcoin! Initial investors are still holding onto their coin, there was no sell-off that caused a crash. The bubble happened when it broke $20 USD/Bitcoin, the value only fell to $15 before settling back at about $20. Why was there a mining explosion? Miners aren't stupid, some of the most serious software analysis I've seen is behind mining programs and deciding when to mine, and when it's too expensive, and how to maximize efficiency, and so forth. The amount of power put behind the network is proportional to the trading price within an order of magnitude -- By comparison, the actual network power has increased what, 3-4 orders of magnitude?
And I'm not aware of any current bubble, over-the-counter trading is holding between $13-$16 in the last few days.
Which by the way is exactly why we use money, i.e. secondary exchange, and not barter: Their trade value for goods commonly has the highest marginal utility, more than for another good, thus economizing exchanges, and making the economy as a whole more efficient. There's lots reasons to argue against a gold standard, but the only one that isn't fallacious is it's too useful a commodity (for aesthetic and electronic purposes) to waste as a money (counter-argument being we need a money that has such intrinsic value, so prices are tied to some useful, industrial purpose).
That bubble fell long before there was any "theft" of Bitcoin, actually. I'm watching the price ticker right now, they're still exchanging for 13-16 USD. By comparison, I started following it when the first markets were formed and traded at $0.05.
No one ever thought Bitcoin was a safe long-term store of value, that's what precious metals are for, or stocks and bonds if you're willing to take risk to grow money even more. But no one would go into a store with gold coin in their pocket and try and weigh it, nevermind an online store or website, that's ridiculous too, that's what Bitcoin was invented for.
Being greedy doesn't do anything for you, the wonderful thing about profit is it necessarily must benefit two people, because it's voluntary. (Even if later someone decides the trade was a mistake, that's a decision made in hindsight.)
Anyone with more than a high school understanding of economics also knows that the rate of price inflation is built into the interest rate. Inflation or deflation is not a problem when you know how it's going to affect prices, it only becomes a problem when it's monetary inflation or deflation (as is the case for recessions in fractional reserve economies) and is unplanned, and then prices rise or fall on you when you didn't expect them to.
The Federal Reserve branches disagree: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE
It may not be polite to disregard the author's wishes, but it's certainly completely ethical. How ethical is it if I, as the author, could tell you "No you're not allowed to store that book YOU bought on anything but a coffee table for the next 20 years"? Copyright does pretty much the same thing at the point when you decide you want to make and distribute copies.
So you're basically implying no matter how rich we get, no matter how productive we are, the existence of a lower class is somehow a bad thing, or at least, is something that can be fixed without making everyone poorer in the process.
How about:
"Inequality isn't something that needs to be 'fixed'. As long as you're not being literally stolen from, you shouldn't be complaining and take advantage what you're offered."
At which point it becomes intrastate commerce, and the state's responsibility instead of the federal government's. Unlike the purposeful perversion of "interstate" trade that FDR created, that's what the constitution actually says. Regulatory powers over commerce under the Constitution is given to either the Federal government or the state, but not both. Sstates are likewise prohibited from taxing and regulating interstate trade except to control banned products coming into the state.
You mean other people's lives? Fail.