Talk about a first world solution.... BTC is a toy for elites, a luxury experiment for groups of people who are already living on solid economic footing. If one is living in a dictatorship with hyper-inflation, chances are they are going to have bigger concerns and are not going to have access to the infrastructure BTC needs to work.
Not really. You are just another poster butthurt enough that you would rather destroy slashdot then let it change. If YOU can't have the toy, no one can.
When one produces a draconian bill to solve a problem that did not exist in the first place, placing new burdens on an regulator that the party has made it quite clear they with to see dismantled, yes, I think it is reasonable to assume that the bill is not good for environmental protection. If it was good for the environment, by their own planks, they would not have introduced it.
Well, if the technology itself got wide spread enough, it could really help with fraud and identity theft. Right now with most payment methods you give them your secret numbers and they pull money from your account, thus anyone who intercepts the secret numbers can also pull money out. With the BTC protocol the merchant gives you a secret number for pushing payment in, which significantly reduces the risk of a 3rd party being able to use it to hurt you. That has significant utility for pretty much everyone involved.
There is nothing libertarians hate more then a free market that fails to cater to their specific needs. After all, if the market does not serve them, some sinister force must be preventing it, or other people are stupid (yet somehow in a real free market, the stupid people magically no longer impact it). Just look at all the iPhone hate going on right now... oh no, not a private company doing something that benefits itself and the vast majority of users do not care about! Apple must cater to them and them alone because they do not want to buy the alternatives!
Wrong kind of processing power. The NSA would be able to obtain more BTC if they killed the power to their computer center and used the money to buy them on the open market.
Someone has to maintain, upgrade, and replace the infrastructure. It used to be that getting 'slashdotted' overloaded small sites, but slashdot itself has to deal with that load all the time.
Well, the point of copyright law is to support the arts and increase common culture. So if short copyrights result in a richer culture of works, then it should be the case. There is no 'god given right' here, all we have are a set of laws intended to benefit everyone, helping the author enforce their will is just a side effect or implementation detail.
Even when the state or country has at-will firing, you still have to justify it to other members of the management team. Either horizontally or vertically, there are often political consequences for firing people for personal, arbitrary, or even counterproductive reasons.
They are trying to solve the problem of wanting to fire individuals but needing cause, and an application like this is pretty much an automatic paper trail generator that can be mined to fit pretty much any firing.
And that is why, with the introduction of game theory, classic economic theories regarding adjustment of supply and demand have fallen out of favor. While there are still some holdouts that cling to that pre 1950s view, they are more likely to be bloggers or people selling books/tv appearances then actual economists.
Thing is, even when it comes to postdocs and grad students, such people in STEM still do a lot better then their counterparts in other fields.
While STEM people might complain that their pay is low compared to what they wish it was, on the whole they are doing a lot better then most professions yet seem to have the idea they would be doing better if not for someone taking away their rightful earning (which is probably why you see such a large contingent of libertarianism in STEM, the belief that they are superior and are being held back by the inferior).
Ok, rant aside, if high earning potential is not enough to get people into STEM, what they should probably be doing is looking into what is discouraging people from studying those fields. Social stigma? HR issues? Hostile working environment (imagine if the gender ratio was even, just how many women could be working in STEM but are not), etc.
I know a lot of people are suggesting it is just a way to find people willing to work extra hours or put in their own time, but I think it might actually be something much simpler and less sinister, an arms race in adjectives.
How do you describe people who are into coding. Well, you can say you 'like' programming, but then the next person says they 'really like' programming. Well, now it sounds like they are more of a programmer, so you up your description to 'uber-like' programming, which then others do to seem baseline. This sets up an expectation in both reading and writing resumes regarding how one describes perfectly normal levels of caring about your work, with increasingly extreme imagery being used because everyone else is doing it to, and anyone who doesn't get into the race looks unenthusiastic in comparison even if just a year ago the same description would have looked good.
Even to other developers, when I was job hunting a significant number of them held up hobby programming as a metric for how good a fit you would be. If were not involved in your own projects it was a sign that you didn't care or would not keep up with new trends or otherwise just not be 'enthusiastic'. Non-programming hobbies were sometimes acceptable, but only if they were robotics or something just barely one-off.
Well, there is consensus if you ignore detractors within your own community. I have noticed that companies where a particular web developer culture is strong tend to hire people who agree with the current development teams and exclude those who do not, so you rapidly get clustering that feels like consensus, but is really just group think.
*nods* and, if nothing else, it is a good indication that there simply is not one right solution and that various domains will always have pieces that suit them best. Though I do find the OP rather odd in that they are describing a single domain as 'across all platforms' and then expresses surprise that other domains have gravitated towards other solutions. Of course server-side technology is going to start looking similar to itself, just like if you go into embedded stuff a lot of it has gravitated towards a more mature consensus. So the OP kinda strikes me as having blinders on.
*nods* litigation, while it has a wonderful DIY feel to it, puts the burden of enforcement on people with slim resources. Regulation on the other hand involves a funded group who's full time job involves ensuring entities are obeying the law.
This is what drives me crazy about people ranting at how 'sue crazy' america is. Of course we see lot of lawsuits, a significant number of our laws are not enforced until someone starts a civil case. Many things that people assume the police and prosecutors would handle in fact can only be triggered by a private lawsuit, thus if one is wronged the state will not help (much less proactively investigate) on your behalf unless one is willing to invest the capital in bringing a civil case.
In general, regulation of higher education is how one determines if an entity is committing fraud or not. "Fraud" is not as simple as 'someone lies', it usually involves having a regulated baseline regarding what is expected in various industries and deviating from that baseline is used to determine if someone is acting fraudiantly or not.
Well, that is the 65,000$ question, isn't it? Unless one is in one of the extreme camps, regulation is a constant balancing act that requires constant examination to determine if it is useful or unnecessary burden.
So the devil will be in the details, with it not being all that clear what this particular case represents. It could be an overreach hurting a useful new service, or it could be simply helping said service mature while stemming ways they could go very wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
/thread
Talk about a first world solution.... BTC is a toy for elites, a luxury experiment for groups of people who are already living on solid economic footing. If one is living in a dictatorship with hyper-inflation, chances are they are going to have bigger concerns and are not going to have access to the infrastructure BTC needs to work.
Not really. You are just another poster butthurt enough that you would rather destroy slashdot then let it change. If YOU can't have the toy, no one can.
I think it is less about production cost, and more people melting down pennies when the metal is worth more then the coin.
When one produces a draconian bill to solve a problem that did not exist in the first place, placing new burdens on an regulator that the party has made it quite clear they with to see dismantled, yes, I think it is reasonable to assume that the bill is not good for environmental protection. If it was good for the environment, by their own planks, they would not have introduced it.
Well, if the technology itself got wide spread enough, it could really help with fraud and identity theft. Right now with most payment methods you give them your secret numbers and they pull money from your account, thus anyone who intercepts the secret numbers can also pull money out. With the BTC protocol the merchant gives you a secret number for pushing payment in, which significantly reduces the risk of a 3rd party being able to use it to hurt you. That has significant utility for pretty much everyone involved.
There is nothing libertarians hate more then a free market that fails to cater to their specific needs. After all, if the market does not serve them, some sinister force must be preventing it, or other people are stupid (yet somehow in a real free market, the stupid people magically no longer impact it). Just look at all the iPhone hate going on right now... oh no, not a private company doing something that benefits itself and the vast majority of users do not care about! Apple must cater to them and them alone because they do not want to buy the alternatives!
Wrong kind of processing power. The NSA would be able to obtain more BTC if they killed the power to their computer center and used the money to buy them on the open market.
Someone has to maintain, upgrade, and replace the infrastructure. It used to be that getting 'slashdotted' overloaded small sites, but slashdot itself has to deal with that load all the time.
Well, the point of copyright law is to support the arts and increase common culture. So if short copyrights result in a richer culture of works, then it should be the case. There is no 'god given right' here, all we have are a set of laws intended to benefit everyone, helping the author enforce their will is just a side effect or implementation detail.
Even when the state or country has at-will firing, you still have to justify it to other members of the management team. Either horizontally or vertically, there are often political consequences for firing people for personal, arbitrary, or even counterproductive reasons.
They are trying to solve the problem of wanting to fire individuals but needing cause, and an application like this is pretty much an automatic paper trail generator that can be mined to fit pretty much any firing.
And that is why, with the introduction of game theory, classic economic theories regarding adjustment of supply and demand have fallen out of favor. While there are still some holdouts that cling to that pre 1950s view, they are more likely to be bloggers or people selling books/tv appearances then actual economists.
Thing is, even when it comes to postdocs and grad students, such people in STEM still do a lot better then their counterparts in other fields.
While STEM people might complain that their pay is low compared to what they wish it was, on the whole they are doing a lot better then most professions yet seem to have the idea they would be doing better if not for someone taking away their rightful earning (which is probably why you see such a large contingent of libertarianism in STEM, the belief that they are superior and are being held back by the inferior).
Ok, rant aside, if high earning potential is not enough to get people into STEM, what they should probably be doing is looking into what is discouraging people from studying those fields. Social stigma? HR issues? Hostile working environment (imagine if the gender ratio was even, just how many women could be working in STEM but are not), etc.
I know a lot of people are suggesting it is just a way to find people willing to work extra hours or put in their own time, but I think it might actually be something much simpler and less sinister, an arms race in adjectives.
How do you describe people who are into coding. Well, you can say you 'like' programming, but then the next person says they 'really like' programming. Well, now it sounds like they are more of a programmer, so you up your description to 'uber-like' programming, which then others do to seem baseline. This sets up an expectation in both reading and writing resumes regarding how one describes perfectly normal levels of caring about your work, with increasingly extreme imagery being used because everyone else is doing it to, and anyone who doesn't get into the race looks unenthusiastic in comparison even if just a year ago the same description would have looked good.
Even to other developers, when I was job hunting a significant number of them held up hobby programming as a metric for how good a fit you would be. If were not involved in your own projects it was a sign that you didn't care or would not keep up with new trends or otherwise just not be 'enthusiastic'. Non-programming hobbies were sometimes acceptable, but only if they were robotics or something just barely one-off.
*nods* that is indeed another piece to a sometimes rather dysfunctional puzzle
Well, there is consensus if you ignore detractors within your own community. I have noticed that companies where a particular web developer culture is strong tend to hire people who agree with the current development teams and exclude those who do not, so you rapidly get clustering that feels like consensus, but is really just group think.
*nods* and, if nothing else, it is a good indication that there simply is not one right solution and that various domains will always have pieces that suit them best. Though I do find the OP rather odd in that they are describing a single domain as 'across all platforms' and then expresses surprise that other domains have gravitated towards other solutions. Of course server-side technology is going to start looking similar to itself, just like if you go into embedded stuff a lot of it has gravitated towards a more mature consensus. So the OP kinda strikes me as having blinders on.
Does zero for mankind? That is a pretty subjective concept. Since I value expanding the human sphere of knowledge, what they did was something.
Well, they do, via regulators like BPPE which set the standards regarding what you can claim and to within what margins those claims can deviate.
Even in B2B situations, often the companies that run these courses are indeed registered with the state.
*nods* litigation, while it has a wonderful DIY feel to it, puts the burden of enforcement on people with slim resources. Regulation on the other hand involves a funded group who's full time job involves ensuring entities are obeying the law.
This is what drives me crazy about people ranting at how 'sue crazy' america is. Of course we see lot of lawsuits, a significant number of our laws are not enforced until someone starts a civil case. Many things that people assume the police and prosecutors would handle in fact can only be triggered by a private lawsuit, thus if one is wronged the state will not help (much less proactively investigate) on your behalf unless one is willing to invest the capital in bringing a civil case.
In general, regulation of higher education is how one determines if an entity is committing fraud or not. "Fraud" is not as simple as 'someone lies', it usually involves having a regulated baseline regarding what is expected in various industries and deviating from that baseline is used to determine if someone is acting fraudiantly or not.
Well, that is the 65,000$ question, isn't it? Unless one is in one of the extreme camps, regulation is a constant balancing act that requires constant examination to determine if it is useful or unnecessary burden.
So the devil will be in the details, with it not being all that clear what this particular case represents. It could be an overreach hurting a useful new service, or it could be simply helping said service mature while stemming ways they could go very wrong.