The thing about people who go into STEM, they like solving problems.... 'it is what it is', is rarely a good reason to not examine and improve something.
Theoretically is the key word. In reality the devices tend to be rather hard to build, require a lot more power, and even under ideal conditions have pretty short range.
I am not so sure. It is not all that unusual to encounter people on slashdot who are for protecting their own privacy AND complain that data (such as music, movies, software, etc) should be free.
One only has to spend a bit of time in one of America's small towns to see this type of thing going on. Those little '5k and under' towns are notorious for this kind of corruption.
Since much of the argument for animal rights pulls from the imagery of how the law treats children, at least from a political perspective there might be an issue there.
I think part of the point as described is that even in the hands of an excellent (professional) driver it is still a dangerous car to use. Also given its unforgiving behavior and steep learning curve, a good driver has an unusually difficult time gauging how well they are handling it and mistakes ballon. That is the problem with unstable equilibrium, one learns how to handle a vehicle by hitting edges of stability but still having enough margin to correct. It sounds like a recurring problem with this car is that band is thin enough that one goes from 'ok' to 'massive failure' with little room for learning. A highly skilled professional driver can feel the band sooner, but the implication is that even for them it is a bit too thin.
Well, that is the current dream of many.. find ways to have all the benefits of operating in the US without paying for it. Taxes are something that it is in one's best interest to have other people paying.
Says a person living in a time and country under keynesian economics who is living in more wealth then any other time and place in history, including ones using earlier less functional economic systems.
Beyond that problem, precious metal coins had issues with deflation. They did not scale with the economy or population growth, and could still be easily disrupted by a mine or two changing production quotas.
Actually, basic economic theory says no such thing, and has not for about 70+ years. That was a popular idea turn of the century, but it has been largely dropped by people who actually study the field, though it lives on in the 'I want to publish a book' world of economics.
To be fair, the ACLU actually has a pretty good track record of protecting conservative and religious activists. Though time and time again I watch those groups quietly accept the ACLU's help on a case and then immediately turn around and demonize them, often even when cases they are working together on are still in litigation.
Since the US has one of the worst human right's problems in the 1st world when it comes to prison populations, I would wager that the US system does not put the rights of criminals above victims. Anyone who feels that a criminal is getting more rights then their victim has not spent any time dealing with the prison system.
Something else to keep in mind, not all of that control is malevolent. One of the historical problems with unregulated economic systems is they tend to be notoriously unstable and have even worse class divides then we have today. People often look back on those times and talk about how great they were, but for the most part only the wealthy and the impact the system had on them makes it into the popular mythology. So while we might feel iffy about some 3rd party being in charge of our fates like that, they have generally had a better track record then leaving things to private entities doing it instead.
That is one of the classic tradeoffs when it comes to freedom. There are all sorts of activities that people both want for personal freedom but are also used by bad people to do, well, bad things. Sometimes it makes sense for the general population to have a freedom restricted in order to make it more difficult for a minority to use that same freedom to hurt people. Other times it doesn't.. and while people will often site extreme examples one way or the other, usually it is a non-trivial trade off.
What I find sad is how many people fight the middle grounds, attempts to find a balance between people keeping their general freedom while still trying to do something to reign in the bad actors. Much of the debate around CTRs is like that, something that disproportionately makes things more difficult for criminals but people still fight it on philosophical personal freedom grounds.
Having worked in the game industry using GPL components, including respecting the spirt of the licenses and giving back to the community, I have to say.... no. There are plenty of ways to use GPL components within a game without having to give out the parts game parts, GPL is fairly explicit about what boundaries the license crosses and which it does not.
Now, granted, we did not allow GPLv3 based projects to touch our code, and I would argue that GPLv3 can be pretty bad for people who want to integrate it into larger software packages. Great for people who do server stuff since it was built to handle that crowd, but yeah, games and such, not so great.
Given how much they depend on grants from private industry and how often those jobs are just stepping stones to corporate labs, such places only barely count as the "academic world".
Historically there have been cases of individual investors who were able to manipulate the currencies of small countries sufficient to actually crash their economy AND government. Given BTC's small scale, one or two big investors could easily pull the strings and bleed small investors dry.
*nod* one real possibility is that BTC will fall out of favor as some other technology rises. All it really takes is one or two killer-markets like SilkRoad accepting it and some competitor could easily take over.
And for the most part, it will probably be the professional currency traders who know economics and psychology like the back of their hands, as opposed to the economic philosophers who read a few blogs based off century old models and now believe they understand macroeconomics.
I wish I had mod points ^_^ but yeah, that is an element that differs from classic bubble mechanics.
We might encounter other problems though such as traders making BTC unproductive for people using it for goods and services. It could also crash if some large (or simply enough) players cash out and deplete various exchange's ability to convert BTC into other currencies, which could cause exchanges to close shop and thus reduce the utility.
Though historically there are plenty of examples of bubbles of easily subdivided items, even including things like gold. So you can not get a housing-style bubble with BTC, but that does not make it immune from the general pattern.
well, some markets already have mechanisms for short selling BTC, though it is debatable if any particular trader or exchange (esp ones outside the US) will actually honor the contracts.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about people who go into STEM, they like solving problems.... 'it is what it is', is rarely a good reason to not examine and improve something.
Theoretically is the key word. In reality the devices tend to be rather hard to build, require a lot more power, and even under ideal conditions have pretty short range.
I can not help but note how fashion conscious anti-hipsters seem to be.
I am not so sure. It is not all that unusual to encounter people on slashdot who are for protecting their own privacy AND complain that data (such as music, movies, software, etc) should be free.
One only has to spend a bit of time in one of America's small towns to see this type of thing going on. Those little '5k and under' towns are notorious for this kind of corruption.
Since much of the argument for animal rights pulls from the imagery of how the law treats children, at least from a political perspective there might be an issue there.
I think part of the point as described is that even in the hands of an excellent (professional) driver it is still a dangerous car to use. Also given its unforgiving behavior and steep learning curve, a good driver has an unusually difficult time gauging how well they are handling it and mistakes ballon. That is the problem with unstable equilibrium, one learns how to handle a vehicle by hitting edges of stability but still having enough margin to correct. It sounds like a recurring problem with this car is that band is thin enough that one goes from 'ok' to 'massive failure' with little room for learning. A highly skilled professional driver can feel the band sooner, but the implication is that even for them it is a bit too thin.
Well, that is the current dream of many.. find ways to have all the benefits of operating in the US without paying for it. Taxes are something that it is in one's best interest to have other people paying.
People often confuse 'not currently sexy with companies less then 5 years old' with 'dead and or dying'.
Says a person living in a time and country under keynesian economics who is living in more wealth then any other time and place in history, including ones using earlier less functional economic systems.
Beyond that problem, precious metal coins had issues with deflation. They did not scale with the economy or population growth, and could still be easily disrupted by a mine or two changing production quotas.
Actually, basic economic theory says no such thing, and has not for about 70+ years. That was a popular idea turn of the century, but it has been largely dropped by people who actually study the field, though it lives on in the 'I want to publish a book' world of economics.
To be fair, the ACLU actually has a pretty good track record of protecting conservative and religious activists. Though time and time again I watch those groups quietly accept the ACLU's help on a case and then immediately turn around and demonize them, often even when cases they are working together on are still in litigation.
Since the US has one of the worst human right's problems in the 1st world when it comes to prison populations, I would wager that the US system does not put the rights of criminals above victims. Anyone who feels that a criminal is getting more rights then their victim has not spent any time dealing with the prison system.
Something else to keep in mind, not all of that control is malevolent. One of the historical problems with unregulated economic systems is they tend to be notoriously unstable and have even worse class divides then we have today. People often look back on those times and talk about how great they were, but for the most part only the wealthy and the impact the system had on them makes it into the popular mythology. So while we might feel iffy about some 3rd party being in charge of our fates like that, they have generally had a better track record then leaving things to private entities doing it instead.
That is one of the classic tradeoffs when it comes to freedom. There are all sorts of activities that people both want for personal freedom but are also used by bad people to do, well, bad things. Sometimes it makes sense for the general population to have a freedom restricted in order to make it more difficult for a minority to use that same freedom to hurt people. Other times it doesn't.. and while people will often site extreme examples one way or the other, usually it is a non-trivial trade off.
What I find sad is how many people fight the middle grounds, attempts to find a balance between people keeping their general freedom while still trying to do something to reign in the bad actors. Much of the debate around CTRs is like that, something that disproportionately makes things more difficult for criminals but people still fight it on philosophical personal freedom grounds.
Having worked in the game industry using GPL components, including respecting the spirt of the licenses and giving back to the community, I have to say.... no. There are plenty of ways to use GPL components within a game without having to give out the parts game parts, GPL is fairly explicit about what boundaries the license crosses and which it does not.
Now, granted, we did not allow GPLv3 based projects to touch our code, and I would argue that GPLv3 can be pretty bad for people who want to integrate it into larger software packages. Great for people who do server stuff since it was built to handle that crowd, but yeah, games and such, not so great.
Given how much they depend on grants from private industry and how often those jobs are just stepping stones to corporate labs, such places only barely count as the "academic world".
I guess in theory you would do a double blind study by tricking the researchers into thinking they are studying something other then eye strain.
Historically there have been cases of individual investors who were able to manipulate the currencies of small countries sufficient to actually crash their economy AND government. Given BTC's small scale, one or two big investors could easily pull the strings and bleed small investors dry.
*nod* one real possibility is that BTC will fall out of favor as some other technology rises. All it really takes is one or two killer-markets like SilkRoad accepting it and some competitor could easily take over.
And for the most part, it will probably be the professional currency traders who know economics and psychology like the back of their hands, as opposed to the economic philosophers who read a few blogs based off century old models and now believe they understand macroeconomics.
I wish I had mod points ^_^ but yeah, that is an element that differs from classic bubble mechanics.
We might encounter other problems though such as traders making BTC unproductive for people using it for goods and services. It could also crash if some large (or simply enough) players cash out and deplete various exchange's ability to convert BTC into other currencies, which could cause exchanges to close shop and thus reduce the utility.
Though historically there are plenty of examples of bubbles of easily subdivided items, even including things like gold. So you can not get a housing-style bubble with BTC, but that does not make it immune from the general pattern.
well, some markets already have mechanisms for short selling BTC, though it is debatable if any particular trader or exchange (esp ones outside the US) will actually honor the contracts.
True, but free speech has always had limitations when it comes to the speech having specific impacts, esp when that speech is part of a crime.