How clever and insightful. Tell me though, what idiotic simplistic thoughts drive the other people who disagree with you? Perhaps next you shall let us know how gays really just want to be women, or something similarly as insightful.
no matter who did it (which, as we know, wasn't the "uppity niggers") it reminds me of a character from Holy Grail:
King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.
French? What are you talking about, I thought this used to be America! What's next? You going to tell me New York used to have some faggot ass unamerican name like "New Amsterdam" or something,
No actually it gave him a sense of right and wrong, so he decided to attack the hypocrites who work for the biggest organized crime syndicate in the area....the government.
Well yah. Pascal was fine. I never actually used it, but I looked at it and decided to stick with C (something about having to type the word "procedure" all the time turned me off). They really didn't look that different. Aside from being a bit obscure these days (can't remember the last time I heard "oh thats written in pascal"), it seems like a fine language.
I never said that that. Context matters! I said: "C is great, even if the vast majority of the time, doing memory allocation "by hand" sucks and delivers no benefit"
The vast majority of the time is...most of the programing that people do. Little one offs, quick little tools, most small applications, web applications etc. I never said that was all very interesting stuff, just that it constitutes most of what most people do with the tools. Its still good to learn and teach because some people need it, and it does teach basic understanding of internals.... and yes, there are many "interesting" things where it is important.... and I would never claim otherwise.
Hell, I like to pull my hand brake and slide the back end of my car around to line up with the driveway, when the roads are icy and nobody else is around. That doesn't mean I feel this is a skill everyone needs, or that I advocate in all road or traffic conditions.
Honestly, I, it took me a long time to get over the bad habits that BASIC taught me, as it is so far removed from modern languages that its barely worth discussing.
It only had the most basic concept of subroutines, no functions. Line number based references? No concept whatsoever of memory allocatio or lexical scoping....
I would say that C is great, even if the vast majority of the time, doing memory allocation "by hand" sucks and delivers no benefit. However, most work is going to be done in higher level, modern languages. Assembly is still worth tossing in there at some point (I wouldn't start there) to really drive home "how the computer works" and to give you some respect for the tools you have.
BASIC though? I loved playing with it but, I found that learning C after it basically meant starting from scratch.
Actually...its not even that.... its really about the money.
There was a great story a while back, I need to find it, that investigated the origin of this law.... do you know who wrote it?
It was written by people who...build private prisons. Why? Well simple, they get paid by the state per inmate, so they want to build and FILL their facilities. The idea was that deporation is federal. The feds drag their feet. So.... if state law incarcerates these people to be deported, and the feds drag their feet.... that means profit for the private prison industry!
They wrote the bill, and convinced the AZ legislature to pass it AS IS. Thing is, they already built the new prison to handle all the new inmates before the bill was even law.
Seriously.... all this immigration BS is a smoke screen and excuse for the private prison industry to bilk the people for tax dollars.
I am a bit too busy to find a link now, but google it, it shouldn't be hard to find.
I lived with a guy who did data forensics professionally. we shared an office so, I occasionally heard him on the phone with defense attorneys, in a rather high profile murder case. It was eye opening how clueless the lawyers were. They would keep asking questions about how long the person spent on this site or that or did this or that.... and he just over and over had to re-explain to them why the evidence can't answer the questions.
It was pretty ridiculous actually. On top of all that, the guys computer was so infected with viruses it was insane. He pulled an image into a VM and brought it up, and the machine was barely usable with all the adware and shit on it.
In the end it didn't matter, it was a pretty open and shut case from the beginning, they were grasping at straws, the guy was convicted, the lawyers inability to grasp the concept of how browser cache works was far more interesting.
I disagree. This is only an after the fact "it was worth it". Simple fact is, the severity of the penalty is actually a poor deterrent, in general. Far greater effect is seen by changing the likelyhood of getting caught at all. Most people will refrain from doing anything that they feel they are likely to get caught for, even if the penalty is rather minor. Far far more people than even consider the severity of the penalty.
I make a good enough living to keep my wife and I in healthcare but, she wouldn't on her own. Many of my friends don't. I know people who see lss than 20k a year, some as low as 12k! A modest apartment in this area will cost more than half that just for rent, usually without utilities included.
All of these people, unless they have families that they can fall back on and have support them, are essentially an illness or accident away from homelessness. Could they/should they do more? Sure... who couldn't? However, at some point those arguments become ridiculous. These are not issues that are going to be solved by telling poor people to work more or get an education. Someone has to do the menial jobs.
Add to that that, based on the stats in my state of MA, at least 40% of the people in there are there for drug "crimes" and petty drug related crimes (a category that studies have shown will be all but gone if drugs are legalized). Clearly the occasional prison rape is appropriate for such people right? I mean, they might have sold some pot or something!
Yah I get the acronym wrong sometimes, I find it hard to remember but, I (luckily) don't have to deal directly with it much.
I started to reply earlier but, really... its nothing to do with HIPAA that I have an issue with. For fucks sake, its the ONLY thing that has ever made these clowns think about security. I remember when they came to me to say "you have to encrypt your laptop now".... I had encrypted it 3 years prior, on my own, while they were still issuing every single employee non-changeable 5 char single case passwords. (no seriously, we are talking less than 5 years ago too)
Also, um, why use zip for password protection? PGP can do symmetric encryption too
At my previous job, we made everyone submit a pgp key, and that is what we used to keep our root password sheet, so everyone could access it. I don't even want to say what they were doing here...lets just say... nothing I would use for my personal accounts. I have been trying to convince people to use keepass... with limited success.
> I believe in the law and follow it to the best of my ability
Right there, I believe, is why you fail to understand these people. I am not amongst their numbers (not my skill set and I am dubious as to what the real long term game is), but I get it...
Why believe in the law? Its not you rlaw. You never wrote it, you never were asked to ratify it. I wasn't, I don't consider it mine, its the law of a government that was bought by the highest bidder a long time ago. Not my government, not our government, its their government. It BELONGS to the ultra rich who purchased it.
We owe them no allegiance, and I see no reason to follow what they call "laws" any more than to avoid getting caught by their thugs. Lulssec is pretty good at not tgetting caught by their thugs. So, why should they follow thei rlaws?
Oh...and I have gotten little more than a ticket or two since I was 16 too... but I don't try AT ALL to do more than look like I follow their laws, their laws are irrelevant to my world view.
heh I work at a healthcare company. Its the same story except, everyone says "HIPPA" allot.
Pretty much, some exec reads an article on passwords or security, and then goes out and decides that everyone needs to implement this security stuff, based on his meager understanding of the article.... um.... welcome to the world of large institutions. Makes you feel real good to know that our lives depend on them doesn't it?
As long as bitcoin provides an attractive way to transfer value, it can go back up.
A vendor can turn coins over into cash within a short time frame, with far less fees and overall risk (straight bitcoin transactions can't be reversed). As long as the price crash doesn't happen between the sale and the bitcoin flip, which, could be done in minutes, but for most of us...could be done in an hour or two (usually).... then 3 days of waiting for the EFT from dwolla for $.25 (per $1000 effectively)
So... it provides a real service to vendors...if consumers are willing to use it...at any price. Only speculators are really effected by price, since everyone else just flips them....but their usage is what supports the price.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 1
You hit the nail on the head for most of it...one thing though...
> Deflation is a common thing when any market is too hot and it just comes to show that there is no substitute for real currency.
Yes but, bitcoin is also new, its been in the spotlight for less than a year now. These levels of deflation don't really seem unreasonable in something so new that still hasn't saturated its market, its still growing as more people either find out about it or turn and take a second look now that they hear they may have judged it wrong before.
They clearly growth like that can't last forever, but, I look at the volumes of bitcoin transactions and think, it could still has a little bit to go before it plateaus..... It does fill a real need and...look at it this way...
If I can sell you a good for bitcoins, and I know that I can send those bitcoins into mtgox and trade them for USD within an hour or so, and have the money on its way to my account in a few days... nearly for free.... thats pretty safe (the chances of a bitcoin value crash happening within such time frames is low) AND quite competitive with credit cards/paypal etc.
So merchants take almost no real risk, since they can turn their coins over quickly, I don't see this as a pyramid scheme at all, it provides a real value to merchants, as long as the base of people willing to trade in it grows (which there is plenty of room for).
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 1
You have excellent points here, but, only if you figure bicoin will be the be all and end all.
I figure bitcoin, in many ways, is more like gold than cash. Its deflationary aspects are good, and mostly good for speculators and people looking to store value, in the long term. Its also great for those who really need strong anonymity etc.
I doubt it will be the only digital currency. It has some real gaps, right in the places that you point at but, I see little reason that something else couldn't bridge those gaps.
Or a great day.... for anyone who wasn't planning to sell anytime soon, when they come back up its going to be way under priced.
The lower price may also shake the confidence of some miners and lower difficulty.... which means more coins for whoever sticks it out... and the next time Shumer or someone gets on the TV about silk road, or some other story runs about bitcoin, and the price raises again.
I mean, its not like people are not using them for trade.
If this becomes a common means of detecting fissile material then nothing will change because building nuclear bombs is way too hard for terrorists to do on their own and isn't worth it when their entire concept is glorified publicity stunts, and most of them are incompetent anyway.
Did I say that I dumped my life savings into bitcoin? Did it sound like I was saying "mortgage your house to buy bitcoins now!"
Investing always involves risk. However, different people have different tolerances to risk. Some people can afford to be more aggressive than others. Some are stupid to invest $100, others can lose 5k and not care.
You do have a point. However, I think your point needs one thing here... the current exchange price of a bitcoin is about $19. Yes I fully expect I can get $19 for a bitcoin. I have done it, I have cashed out the money, I was quite happy.
The real issue that you are getting at but not saying explicitly is the depth of that price. Look at the depth charts and you will see... yes you can sell a few btc for $19...but the more you want to sell, the lower into the bids you have to go to get them sold.
Now you COULD put up an ask at 19 and just let it sit there until it is filled, but, all you will be doing is essentially capping the sales side of the market and forcing everyone who wants to sell to come under you, and drive down the price.
All this is a little hard to quantify since mtgox has a trading API so we have to assume that there are automated trading bots out there, capable of responding to the market in real time. As such, the depth charts are misleading since they can't account for the orders that have not been placed yet, but will be placed in response to such moves.
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How clever and insightful. Tell me though, what idiotic simplistic thoughts drive the other people who disagree with you? Perhaps next you shall let us know how gays really just want to be women, or something similarly as insightful.
no matter who did it (which, as we know, wasn't the "uppity niggers") it reminds me of a character from Holy Grail:
French? What are you talking about, I thought this used to be America! What's next? You going to tell me New York used to have some faggot ass unamerican name like "New Amsterdam" or something,
No actually it gave him a sense of right and wrong, so he decided to attack the hypocrites who work for the biggest organized crime syndicate in the area....the government.
Makes sense to me, the kid should get a reward.
Well yah. Pascal was fine. I never actually used it, but I looked at it and decided to stick with C (something about having to type the word "procedure" all the time turned me off). They really didn't look that different. Aside from being a bit obscure these days (can't remember the last time I heard "oh thats written in pascal"), it seems like a fine language.
I never said that that. Context matters! I said:
"C is great, even if the vast majority of the time, doing memory allocation "by hand" sucks and delivers no benefit"
The vast majority of the time is...most of the programing that people do. Little one offs, quick little tools, most small applications, web applications etc. I never said that was all very interesting stuff, just that it constitutes most of what most people do with the tools. Its still good to learn and teach because some people need it, and it does teach basic understanding of internals.... and yes, there are many "interesting" things where it is important.... and I would never claim otherwise.
Hell, I like to pull my hand brake and slide the back end of my car around to line up with the driveway, when the roads are icy and nobody else is around. That doesn't mean I feel this is a skill everyone needs, or that I advocate in all road or traffic conditions.
Except this is NY. The first time someone did that, there would be a law against it to protect the children!
I started with Applesoft BASIC myself.
Honestly, I, it took me a long time to get over the bad habits that BASIC taught me, as it is so far removed from modern languages that its barely worth discussing.
It only had the most basic concept of subroutines, no functions. Line number based references? No concept whatsoever of memory allocatio or lexical scoping....
I would say that C is great, even if the vast majority of the time, doing memory allocation "by hand" sucks and delivers no benefit. However, most work is going to be done in higher level, modern languages. Assembly is still worth tossing in there at some point (I wouldn't start there) to really drive home "how the computer works" and to give you some respect for the tools you have.
BASIC though? I loved playing with it but, I found that learning C after it basically meant starting from scratch.
Actually...its not even that.... its really about the money.
There was a great story a while back, I need to find it, that investigated the origin of this law.... do you know who wrote it?
It was written by people who...build private prisons. Why? Well simple, they get paid by the state per inmate, so they want to build and FILL their facilities. The idea was that deporation is federal. The feds drag their feet. So.... if state law incarcerates these people to be deported, and the feds drag their feet.... that means profit for the private prison industry!
They wrote the bill, and convinced the AZ legislature to pass it AS IS. Thing is, they already built the new prison to handle all the new inmates before the bill was even law.
Seriously.... all this immigration BS is a smoke screen and excuse for the private prison industry to bilk the people for tax dollars.
I am a bit too busy to find a link now, but google it, it shouldn't be hard to find.
I lived with a guy who did data forensics professionally. we shared an office so, I occasionally heard him on the phone with defense attorneys, in a rather high profile murder case. It was eye opening how clueless the lawyers were. They would keep asking questions about how long the person spent on this site or that or did this or that.... and he just over and over had to re-explain to them why the evidence can't answer the questions.
It was pretty ridiculous actually. On top of all that, the guys computer was so infected with viruses it was insane. He pulled an image into a VM and brought it up, and the machine was barely usable with all the adware and shit on it.
In the end it didn't matter, it was a pretty open and shut case from the beginning, they were grasping at straws, the guy was convicted, the lawyers inability to grasp the concept of how browser cache works was far more interesting.
I disagree. This is only an after the fact "it was worth it". Simple fact is, the severity of the penalty is actually a poor deterrent, in general. Far greater effect is seen by changing the likelyhood of getting caught at all. Most people will refrain from doing anything that they feel they are likely to get caught for, even if the penalty is rather minor. Far far more people than even consider the severity of the penalty.
And that is "median".... so half are that less.
I make a good enough living to keep my wife and I in healthcare but, she wouldn't on her own. Many of my friends don't. I know people who see lss than 20k a year, some as low as 12k! A modest apartment in this area will cost more than half that just for rent, usually without utilities included.
All of these people, unless they have families that they can fall back on and have support them, are essentially an illness or accident away from homelessness. Could they/should they do more? Sure... who couldn't? However, at some point those arguments become ridiculous. These are not issues that are going to be solved by telling poor people to work more or get an education. Someone has to do the menial jobs.
Add to that that, based on the stats in my state of MA, at least 40% of the people in there are there for drug "crimes" and petty drug related crimes (a category that studies have shown will be all but gone if drugs are legalized). Clearly the occasional prison rape is appropriate for such people right? I mean, they might have sold some pot or something!
Yah I get the acronym wrong sometimes, I find it hard to remember but, I (luckily) don't have to deal directly with it much.
I started to reply earlier but, really... its nothing to do with HIPAA that I have an issue with. For fucks sake, its the ONLY thing that has ever made these clowns think about security. I remember when they came to me to say "you have to encrypt your laptop now".... I had encrypted it 3 years prior, on my own, while they were still issuing every single employee non-changeable 5 char single case passwords. (no seriously, we are talking less than 5 years ago too)
Also, um, why use zip for password protection? PGP can do symmetric encryption too
At my previous job, we made everyone submit a pgp key, and that is what we used to keep our root password sheet, so everyone could access it. I don't even want to say what they were doing here...lets just say... nothing I would use for my personal accounts. I have been trying to convince people to use keepass... with limited success.
> I believe in the law and follow it to the best of my ability
Right there, I believe, is why you fail to understand these people. I am not amongst their numbers (not my skill set and I am dubious as to what the real long term game is), but I get it...
Why believe in the law? Its not you rlaw. You never wrote it, you never were asked to ratify it. I wasn't, I don't consider it mine, its the law of a government that was bought by the highest bidder a long time ago. Not my government, not our government, its their government. It BELONGS to the ultra rich who purchased it.
We owe them no allegiance, and I see no reason to follow what they call "laws" any more than to avoid getting caught by their thugs. Lulssec is pretty good at not tgetting caught by their thugs. So, why should they follow thei rlaws?
Oh...and I have gotten little more than a ticket or two since I was 16 too... but I don't try AT ALL to do more than look like I follow their laws, their laws are irrelevant to my world view.
heh I work at a healthcare company. Its the same story except, everyone says "HIPPA" allot.
Pretty much, some exec reads an article on passwords or security, and then goes out and decides that everyone needs to implement this security stuff, based on his meager understanding of the article.... um.... welcome to the world of large institutions. Makes you feel real good to know that our lives depend on them doesn't it?
If the price collapses....it doesn't matter....
As long as bitcoin provides an attractive way to transfer value, it can go back up.
A vendor can turn coins over into cash within a short time frame, with far less fees and overall risk (straight bitcoin transactions can't be reversed). As long as the price crash doesn't happen between the sale and the bitcoin flip, which, could be done in minutes, but for most of us...could be done in an hour or two (usually).... then 3 days of waiting for the EFT from dwolla for $.25 (per $1000 effectively)
So... it provides a real service to vendors...if consumers are willing to use it...at any price. Only speculators are really effected by price, since everyone else just flips them....but their usage is what supports the price.
You hit the nail on the head for most of it...one thing though...
> Deflation is a common thing when any market is too hot and it just comes to show that there is no substitute for real currency.
Yes but, bitcoin is also new, its been in the spotlight for less than a year now. These levels of deflation don't really seem unreasonable in something so new that still hasn't saturated its market, its still growing as more people either find out about it or turn and take a second look now that they hear they may have judged it wrong before.
They clearly growth like that can't last forever, but, I look at the volumes of bitcoin transactions and think, it could still has a little bit to go before it plateaus..... It does fill a real need and...look at it this way...
If I can sell you a good for bitcoins, and I know that I can send those bitcoins into mtgox and trade them for USD within an hour or so, and have the money on its way to my account in a few days... nearly for free.... thats pretty safe (the chances of a bitcoin value crash happening within such time frames is low) AND quite competitive with credit cards/paypal etc.
So merchants take almost no real risk, since they can turn their coins over quickly, I don't see this as a pyramid scheme at all, it provides a real value to merchants, as long as the base of people willing to trade in it grows (which there is plenty of room for).
You have excellent points here, but, only if you figure bicoin will be the be all and end all.
I figure bitcoin, in many ways, is more like gold than cash. Its deflationary aspects are good, and mostly good for speculators and people looking to store value, in the long term. Its also great for those who really need strong anonymity etc.
I doubt it will be the only digital currency. It has some real gaps, right in the places that you point at but, I see little reason that something else couldn't bridge those gaps.
Or a great day.... for anyone who wasn't planning to sell anytime soon, when they come back up its going to be way under priced.
The lower price may also shake the confidence of some miners and lower difficulty.... which means more coins for whoever sticks it out... and the next time Shumer or someone gets on the TV about silk road, or some other story runs about bitcoin, and the price raises again.
I mean, its not like people are not using them for trade.
Just install passkey (or equivalent) and you can use long, random passwords everywhere.
I believe when I generated my mtgox password I had it set for about 20 chars... with non-alphanumeric chars.
Um its only physics if he was testing a hypothesis.
He took established physical law and known to work configurations and built one, solving the myriad of technical challenges.
Thats engineering,
If this becomes a common means of detecting fissile material then nothing will change because building nuclear bombs is way too hard for terrorists to do on their own and isn't worth it when their entire concept is glorified publicity stunts, and most of them are incompetent anyway.
There... fixed that for you.
Um yah duh.
Did I say that I dumped my life savings into bitcoin? Did it sound like I was saying "mortgage your house to buy bitcoins now!"
Investing always involves risk. However, different people have different tolerances to risk. Some people can afford to be more aggressive than others. Some are stupid to invest $100, others can lose 5k and not care.
You do have a point. However, I think your point needs one thing here... the current exchange price of a bitcoin is about $19. Yes I fully expect I can get $19 for a bitcoin. I have done it, I have cashed out the money, I was quite happy.
The real issue that you are getting at but not saying explicitly is the depth of that price. Look at the depth charts and you will see... yes you can sell a few btc for $19...but the more you want to sell, the lower into the bids you have to go to get them sold.
Now you COULD put up an ask at 19 and just let it sit there until it is filled, but, all you will be doing is essentially capping the sales side of the market and forcing everyone who wants to sell to come under you, and drive down the price.
All this is a little hard to quantify since mtgox has a trading API so we have to assume that there are automated trading bots out there, capable of responding to the market in real time. As such, the depth charts are misleading since they can't account for the orders that have not been placed yet, but will be placed in response to such moves.