Um...last I checked a postcard is usually written on the same side as the address, and we know the USPS is photographing all mail. So actually, they are, in fact, already doing this.
I recently heard how Reagan started his career....calling baseball games. Back in the era when he would get a small abbreviated summary on a news ticker, and then would make up a story based on the description of the game, pretending like he was actually watching it, even faking the sound of bats hitting balls..... putting on a show as if he was there, when in reality, he was sitting in a dull room getting small bits of information over a ticker.
It seemed like quite a metaphor for holding such high office.
> Getting a credit card in multiple places at the same time (to make instant transaction fraud > practical/profitable) is pretty tricky AND illegal. Getting a bitcoin wallet in the same place at the > same time is trivial AND legal.
Legal? Pretty sure its still fraud. Not only that but it leaves behind a signed transaction that only the fraudster could have produced. We have already seen someone lose in court after trying the "But bitcoins are not real money" excuse. They are, and a contract is a contract, even if its verbal or implicit in the transaction.
> There is also a healthy margin included in credit card fees, > specifically to account for fraud. People will not want to switch to a system where fraud was > hot-potatoed to the last one holding the invalid bitcoin transaction, no matter how many technical > advancements are layered on to make it harder. This makes Bitcoin useless as an in-person instant > payment system.
Why not? Not every fraud is equal, and vendors, at least smart ones, are willing to put up with some amount of "shrink" (as they like to call it) if reducing it to zero is not worth the cost. I think you are overrestimating people's aversion to risk. They may not like it when you describe it in those terms, but, it is really no different from other areas of business; and its just another cost of doing business.
Certainly there are many cases we could be talking about. If I were doing a bitcoin exchange of 100 btc, which currently is around 10k, then yes, you better believe I would expect 2 or even 3 confirmations before it was considered accepted.... but what about.... a cup of coffee for a small fraction of a bitcoin? There are many small transactions where cheating just isn't worth it, those are the only ones I would suggest ever do something like this. Its all a matter of what risk you are willing to take.
On top of this, I do think this sort of system could mitigate some of this risk. Imagine a setup where you have a transaction processor, could be local, could be a service. The processor has several bitcoin nodes, which are not peered with eachother. Consider a transaction valid if A) It has been seen at multiple nodes (proves it is propagating) and B) There are no other seen and unprocessed transactions which would invalidate this one.
Now a double spend is technically possible, but unlikely to work. It is a risk, yes, but if all you have on the line is $3-$10 worth of coins.... it is probably an acceptable risk. If someone does double spend, you lose, but you don't loose much, and the only confidence destroyed is in the instant acceptance mechanism.
The real question is not will it be abused, but, will the convinenece bring in more profit than the losses from bad actors?
Meh, you are right of course, but, there is always some tradeoff between convinence and risk. Yes, theoretically the safe bet is to wait for it to enter the block chain, and even safer, to wait for a few confirmations. You know what though, many transactions that people do, are ones where this level of risk is acceptable because the barrier to cheating outweights the benefit for low value transactions.
I mean seriously, how many vendors accept credit cards now? Do you really think the risk involved with dealing with credit card processors is lower than that of accepting bitcoin transactions instantly? Some amount of risk is always acceptable; its just a matter of where you draw that line.
Frankly, I think it should be possible to reasonably mitigate most of those concerns without much change in the system.
Cell phones already have a great RNG, its called the "touch screen"....aka the same RNG thats used to dial random international numbers every time it decides to randomly unlock in your pocket.
Could just have the touch screen polled randomly while the screen is off, if some random portion is being pressed, extract some entropy from it and toss it in the pool. I am pretty sure the interactions between my thigh, pants, and screen could produce every bit as much entropy as wiggling a mouse around.
Depends pm what you mean. Any time there are less than, I believe the number is 5400 blocks in two weeks, that the hardness adjusts to attempt to maintain, or about one block every 10 minutes. Technically, if someone can present a valid transaction, you could accept it instantly and say bitcoin has no delay.
Technically the transaction isn't official till its in a block, but once its transmitted out to the network valid, its almost guaranteed to be in one within 10 minutes or so, and each block that buries it, solidifies it further.
What is accepted? Last I looked, the default client didn't consider a transaction accepted until several blocks AFTER it was accepted, so we are talking 20-30 minutes or so.
But.... you could accept bitcoins "instantly" (pretty quick anyway) if you have the most recent block chain, and are sure the transaction has been transmitted out to the public network. There are some small risks in terms of the possibility of accepting a transaction while the block chain is split and a competing transaction being inserted into the other chain, which then wins.... but.... if anyone really does make exploiting such a situation practical and profitable, countermeasures could be achieved pretty easily, it wouldn't be hard to use multiple nodes to watch for block chain splits and monitor what transactions are going out.
Have a few nodes that are not peers of eachother, one transmits the transaction, all the rest watch for it, and watch for splits/competing transactions, etc. I am sure somebody can come up with a pretty safe way to fast accept bitcoins if they haven't already.
This is very true....and that is before you even get to the other question... even if they are not lieing, how do you know they are really a good commentor? Now, at this point, as we have had several blender's burn out, my wife is familiar with several of the models on the market. I honestly doubt there are too many other devices that we are as familiar with across different brands/models.
So what if you think this is the greatest cordless drill ever and the battery just goes forever. How do I know you are not basing that on a comparison with some cheap crap drill you bought in the mid 90s with a battery that shit the bed after a handful of recharges?
Not only that but, its rare that someone goes back and re-evalutes the product later. I have seen it...I have totally seen amazon reviews that said one thing, then had an edit explaining "Now that I have been using it for 6 months some issues have cropped up..."
Even less likely is that they get the product and use it before they up or downvote the comment. So really the only question on comment ratings is not really about accuracy but about whether it helped you decide to buy or not.
I generally look for posts of substance, that seem to actually have knowledge of what a product does and how it should work... but that are not so in depth as to look professionally writen, or by commenters that comment on 6 items a day (seriously, you really think I think you could possibly buy and evaluate that much crap?)
Also I find looking for the mid range star ratings is best. I generally skip right over the 5 star ratings for some 3 and 4 stars first, to get a feel for whats wrong with it. Often the features are less important than the defects, and its more about picking which defects I can live with than which features are best.
> I think a bigger problem is that the show's current viewership expects a Doctor who's both heroic and > attractive. The whole women want him, men want to be him thing.
Except, then you bring in Caprain Jack and even a few others and, I think its clear they have started to weave in some "Men want him" too.
Exactly, because part of "compensating" is knowing when to put down the phone or ask the person on the other end to shut up for a minute. I could chatter all day long in...well...basically the same situation where I can put on the cruise control and leave it.... or where its just straight line stop and go. Big deal, whatever.
Come up to a rotary? Or a merge? and I am sorry, but the conversation has to take a back seat. "Give me a minute, I am driving"...."one sec, I need to merge here". Sometimes, I even put the phone down in my lap or the passenger seat, or hand it off.
Yet I know some of these bad accident prone drivers. I have sat there in the passenger seat while they were looking over their shoulder trying to judge a merge, while still trying to talk and hold their conversation. Believe me, if I am doing that, and I haven't asked you to give me a minute, its only because I wasn't listening to you anyway.
No that isn't the problem, because I don't have those conversations in the car if I can reasonably avoid it. In fact, when I do talk on the phone in the car, I tend to pay less attention to the call than the road; to the point that the conversation suffers.
The problem is that not everybody does this, and some people are piss poor at deciding which to pay more attention to. It is not a universal problem; I know people who fall into multiples of these categories.
Actually a friend of mine tells an amusing story of being in a class in HS where the teacher brought out the alcohol and driving stats and asked the class "What do these stats tell you?"
Apparently the teacher didn't like it when he raised his hand and said something which I actually believe to be true: "It takes about 10 years to learn how to drive a car well".
I would have laughed at you had you said that to me when I was in my early 20s. At this point, I would smack my 20something self for being stupid.
More likely those people are just not representative of drivers using cell phones. You notice them more, because of selection bias.
Most cell phone drivers are the ones sitting in some random lane, not changing lanes, driving slow and making everyone pass them. They are sitting at red lights after the green, and letting people pass when they should go.
> Conversations can be more distracting than ethanol
However, I don't think distraction is the problem here. A distracted driver can, so some degree, compensate. Everyone has limits, I too have asked people to shut up or told the person on the phone "hold on a second, I need to drive" when a situation got precarious.
On the other hand, I know some bad drivers who have called me and talked for hours and never said such a thing.
But ethanol....thats special. I remember the first time I got drunk. The first clear thought I had was "I am fine, this stuff has no effect on me, I could do anything I normally do". Right after saying this, I stood up...and promptly the room started to spin and I fell back into my seat.
The problem with ethanol is not the famed "reaction time". As my Motorcycle safety and driving instructors both said.... if you are driving so close that raw reaction time matters that much, you are already in trouble.
The problem is that ethanol supresses the ability of most people to judge how impaired they are. An impaired driver can compensate (to a degree anyway), a driver who doesn't feel he is impaired can't.
That is the real danger of ethanol, fuck reaction times. I bet you my grandmother, before her car died, had reaction times as bad as a drunk driver, but, that's why she drove maddeningly slow down the road (I was stuck behind her a few times actually)...she was impaired, she compensated; drunk people often can't do that.
This jives pretty well with the study I have been showing everyone I can which actually studied the individuals who DO get in accidents with cell phones. What it found was that, as a group, they tended to get in more accidents than other drivers; even when not using cell phones!
Not only that but, while it has been found that most drivers using cell phones drive more cautiously; but these drivers in particular tended to drive LESS cautiously when distracted! This pretty clearly pointed to bad drivers with cell phones being more a judgement issue than a distraction issue.
So these findings are pretty unsurprising in light of that. It has been known for a while now that decreasing real phone usage doesn't change accident rates. NY state observed a 60% decrease in the number of drivers on the road observed to be using cell phones.... with no change in its accident rates.
What does the cannon have to say about time lords passing regenerations to eachother?
We saw River Song do this, to which the Doctor remarked "You didn't have to do that", and indicated that she gave up all of her remaining regenerations. My circle of friends has been speculating that this was done to set him up to go past 13, using the regenerations she gave him.... which may also setup a situation where they can switch him to a female and create new cannon, if this is a new situation.
Admittedly, I am no expert on The Doctor and only ever watched a handful of mostly Tom Baker episodes as a kid prior to the new series.... but it seems like it would open up possibilities.
OTOTH does the cannon actually forbid it? Just because its never been seen before doesn't mean it can't happen, just means its potentially rare or requiring of some new element....which they seem to have already set up.
However, we did have the incident with River Song saving the doctor. It was said that she gave up all the rest of her regenerations (10 left was it? I forget), he remarked that she didn't need to do that, but as things go in the series, without any explanation as to whether he meant she didn't need to save him or she didn't need to give them ALL up. Its also unclear if he now has his life extended by the number she gave up (one less maybe?).
I do think that will be used as an excuse to continue past a 13th doctor... if so it should refill the series up past 20, but, it also gives a potential plot easy excuse for a female doctor.
Though I agree with some of my friends, though less adamantly than some of them them.... the really tiring thing with the series is how now every companion now is "the most special person who was ever special" as one of my friend's likes to put it.
Thanks, I always have trouble remembering the actual case names. The wikipedia university arm chair legal degree program isn't quite as intensive and all encompassing as law school, but I am sure you know that:)
I wish I could remember what it was, it was a recent decision, past 5 years or so. Your comment on "pretend its a tax" reminded me of it....supreme court struck down some law, but, in the decision, actually gave advice as to how the congress could achieve the same violation of the spirit of the constitution, but without narrowly transgressing against its letter. Seemed bad form to me....but that is about what its come to.... clearly the view is not that they have too much power but, that their power is too restricted and they just need to find a way around these pesky restrictions.
Exactly. And even if they turn their computing power against it, all they can do is erase transactions from the block chain. They still can only generate new transactions if they have the account, and there is nothing that stops the original transactions from re-entering the block chain. In fact, I would assume that the client already deals with this by finding all of the previously accepted transactions that are not in the new chain, and adding them to its pool for the next block.
So unless they already have bought large numbers of bitcoin, they can't even change transactions, all they can do is submit a new block chain that doesn't have some existing transactions; which get immediately added back to the pool for the next block.
Perhaps they are planning this...in fact, maybe all bitcoin really is, is a whole bunch of sting and reverse sting operations where police are unwittingly at both ends of the majority of transactions and propping up the entire currency by doing so?
Beats me but, whoever designed the system definitely didn't think to highly of blindly trusting authorities; and avoided it at very basic levels. The simplicity of the basic rule set that nodes operate under is pure art.
Say what you want about whether its a good currency, or viable in any particular way in the short, mid, or long term. I don't care what the current price or future price is.... as far as a design goes.... its an interesting answer to the question of how you do implement digital cash?
Maybe you don't think its a good idea, or even a good goal. That is fair, but, as an answer, it is beyond working code, and so far serious attacks remain theoretical, and impractical. Give some credit where it is due, somebody did a great job there and has advanced the question of digital cash more than we have seen since DigiCash looked promising.
Even if bitcoin falls apart tomorrow, it will still be an important milestone and it is unlikely to be the last attempt made at digital cash.
Actually, I really like the idea behind namecoin, using proofs of work chains for DNS. No central authority, no domain censorship.
> When has the government ever ruled that it lacks the power to regulate something?
When it relates to shooting children in a school zone. There was, briefly, a federal law punishing use of firearms in a school zone under the idea that since they could regulate commerce, and guns and ammo are sold on the market, it was all good. The Supreme Court, rightfully if you ask me (if the your state can't pass a law against shooting kids, is that really a federal problem?), decided that this did not hold muster.
What pisses me off, of course, is not this ruling, as I said, its a local/state problem at best, and already taken care of by the majority of states, but that it was held up as the first time in 40 years that the commerce clause had struck ANYTHING down.
I mean seriously, this clause has been extended to apply to a farmer who would rather grow his own feed (apparently "not participating in the market" is a market activity and still subject to regulation) than buy it.... using it at all to strike down anything at this point is the height of ridiculousness.
> The motivation behind Bitcoin wasn't to create a currency that government would choose not to > regulate; it was to create one that government could not regulate.
Exactly. Sure you can effectively regulate many transactions, you can banish it from the legal market. However, the only way bitcoin itself shuts down, is if people stop running the software. In theory (yes its a laughable scenario in any real way) as long as one system exists holding the last good block chain....it can come back.
Bitcoin can only be shut down by voluntary consensus of the community of people running it. It can be relegated to the black market, it can be pushed to obscurity, people caught running it can be railroaded, but, as long as it runs, it runs.
Its a nice hack really. That was what attracted me to it from day one, I read the white paper and a light went off, this is just the next evolution of p2p services,.... they learned from napster and all the others that got shut down and avoided the structural weakness inherent in a single authority.
Slashdot Mirror
Um...last I checked a postcard is usually written on the same side as the address, and we know the USPS is photographing all mail. So actually, they are, in fact, already doing this.
I recently heard how Reagan started his career....calling baseball games. Back in the era when he would get a small abbreviated summary on a news ticker, and then would make up a story based on the description of the game, pretending like he was actually watching it, even faking the sound of bats hitting balls..... putting on a show as if he was there, when in reality, he was sitting in a dull room getting small bits of information over a ticker.
It seemed like quite a metaphor for holding such high office.
> Getting a credit card in multiple places at the same time (to make instant transaction fraud
> practical/profitable) is pretty tricky AND illegal. Getting a bitcoin wallet in the same place at the
> same time is trivial AND legal.
Legal? Pretty sure its still fraud. Not only that but it leaves behind a signed transaction that only the fraudster could have produced. We have already seen someone lose in court after trying the "But bitcoins are not real money" excuse. They are, and a contract is a contract, even if its verbal or implicit in the transaction.
> There is also a healthy margin included in credit card fees,
> specifically to account for fraud. People will not want to switch to a system where fraud was
> hot-potatoed to the last one holding the invalid bitcoin transaction, no matter how many technical
> advancements are layered on to make it harder. This makes Bitcoin useless as an in-person instant
> payment system.
Why not? Not every fraud is equal, and vendors, at least smart ones, are willing to put up with some amount of "shrink" (as they like to call it) if reducing it to zero is not worth the cost. I think you are overrestimating people's aversion to risk. They may not like it when you describe it in those terms, but, it is really no different from other areas of business; and its just another cost of doing business.
Understating? Maybe, thats debatable at least.
Certainly there are many cases we could be talking about. If I were doing a bitcoin exchange of 100 btc, which currently is around 10k, then yes, you better believe I would expect 2 or even 3 confirmations before it was considered accepted.... but what about.... a cup of coffee for a small fraction of a bitcoin? There are many small transactions where cheating just isn't worth it, those are the only ones I would suggest ever do something like this. Its all a matter of what risk you are willing to take.
On top of this, I do think this sort of system could mitigate some of this risk. Imagine a setup where you have a transaction processor, could be local, could be a service. The processor has several bitcoin nodes, which are not peered with eachother. Consider a transaction valid if A) It has been seen at multiple nodes (proves it is propagating) and B) There are no other seen and unprocessed transactions which would invalidate this one.
Now a double spend is technically possible, but unlikely to work. It is a risk, yes, but if all you have on the line is $3-$10 worth of coins.... it is probably an acceptable risk. If someone does double spend, you lose, but you don't loose much, and the only confidence destroyed is in the instant acceptance mechanism.
The real question is not will it be abused, but, will the convinenece bring in more profit than the losses from bad actors?
Meh, you are right of course, but, there is always some tradeoff between convinence and risk. Yes, theoretically the safe bet is to wait for it to enter the block chain, and even safer, to wait for a few confirmations. You know what though, many transactions that people do, are ones where this level of risk is acceptable because the barrier to cheating outweights the benefit for low value transactions.
I mean seriously, how many vendors accept credit cards now? Do you really think the risk involved with dealing with credit card processors is lower than that of accepting bitcoin transactions instantly? Some amount of risk is always acceptable; its just a matter of where you draw that line.
Frankly, I think it should be possible to reasonably mitigate most of those concerns without much change in the system.
Cell phones already have a great RNG, its called the "touch screen"....aka the same RNG thats used to dial random international numbers every time it decides to randomly unlock in your pocket.
Could just have the touch screen polled randomly while the screen is off, if some random portion is being pressed, extract some entropy from it and toss it in the pool. I am pretty sure the interactions between my thigh, pants, and screen could produce every bit as much entropy as wiggling a mouse around.
Depends pm what you mean. Any time there are less than, I believe the number is 5400 blocks in two weeks, that the hardness adjusts to attempt to maintain, or about one block every 10 minutes. Technically, if someone can present a valid transaction, you could accept it instantly and say bitcoin has no delay.
Technically the transaction isn't official till its in a block, but once its transmitted out to the network valid, its almost guaranteed to be in one within 10 minutes or so, and each block that buries it, solidifies it further.
What is accepted? Last I looked, the default client didn't consider a transaction accepted until several blocks AFTER it was accepted, so we are talking 20-30 minutes or so.
But.... you could accept bitcoins "instantly" (pretty quick anyway) if you have the most recent block chain, and are sure the transaction has been transmitted out to the public network. There are some small risks in terms of the possibility of accepting a transaction while the block chain is split and a competing transaction being inserted into the other chain, which then wins.... but.... if anyone really does make exploiting such a situation practical and profitable, countermeasures could be achieved pretty easily, it wouldn't be hard to use multiple nodes to watch for block chain splits and monitor what transactions are going out.
Have a few nodes that are not peers of eachother, one transmits the transaction, all the rest watch for it, and watch for splits/competing transactions, etc. I am sure somebody can come up with a pretty safe way to fast accept bitcoins if they haven't already.
Very well could just be as they say, a poor choice of words. Maybe he just wanted her to do the needful?
Sounds like you are in denial...and if you say you aren't that is just confirmation that you are definitely in denial.
This is very true....and that is before you even get to the other question... even if they are not lieing, how do you know they are really a good commentor? Now, at this point, as we have had several blender's burn out, my wife is familiar with several of the models on the market. I honestly doubt there are too many other devices that we are as familiar with across different brands/models.
So what if you think this is the greatest cordless drill ever and the battery just goes forever. How do I know you are not basing that on a comparison with some cheap crap drill you bought in the mid 90s with a battery that shit the bed after a handful of recharges?
Not only that but, its rare that someone goes back and re-evalutes the product later. I have seen it...I have totally seen amazon reviews that said one thing, then had an edit explaining "Now that I have been using it for 6 months some issues have cropped up..."
Even less likely is that they get the product and use it before they up or downvote the comment. So really the only question on comment ratings is not really about accuracy but about whether it helped you decide to buy or not.
I generally look for posts of substance, that seem to actually have knowledge of what a product does and how it should work... but that are not so in depth as to look professionally writen, or by commenters that comment on 6 items a day (seriously, you really think I think you could possibly buy and evaluate that much crap?)
Also I find looking for the mid range star ratings is best. I generally skip right over the 5 star ratings for some 3 and 4 stars first, to get a feel for whats wrong with it. Often the features are less important than the defects, and its more about picking which defects I can live with than which features are best.
That you are about to start telling people to stay off your lawn.
Embrace the power of AND.
Fire 100% AND imprison 100% seems like a fine compromise to me, I would support it.
> I think a bigger problem is that the show's current viewership expects a Doctor who's both heroic and
> attractive. The whole women want him, men want to be him thing.
Except, then you bring in Caprain Jack and even a few others and, I think its clear they have started to weave in some "Men want him" too.
Exactly, because part of "compensating" is knowing when to put down the phone or ask the person on the other end to shut up for a minute. I could chatter all day long in...well...basically the same situation where I can put on the cruise control and leave it.... or where its just straight line stop and go. Big deal, whatever.
Come up to a rotary? Or a merge? and I am sorry, but the conversation has to take a back seat. "Give me a minute, I am driving"...."one sec, I need to merge here". Sometimes, I even put the phone down in my lap or the passenger seat, or hand it off.
Yet I know some of these bad accident prone drivers. I have sat there in the passenger seat while they were looking over their shoulder trying to judge a merge, while still trying to talk and hold their conversation. Believe me, if I am doing that, and I haven't asked you to give me a minute, its only because I wasn't listening to you anyway.
No that isn't the problem, because I don't have those conversations in the car if I can reasonably avoid it. In fact, when I do talk on the phone in the car, I tend to pay less attention to the call than the road; to the point that the conversation suffers.
The problem is that not everybody does this, and some people are piss poor at deciding which to pay more attention to. It is not a universal problem; I know people who fall into multiples of these categories.
Actually a friend of mine tells an amusing story of being in a class in HS where the teacher brought out the alcohol and driving stats and asked the class "What do these stats tell you?"
Apparently the teacher didn't like it when he raised his hand and said something which I actually believe to be true: "It takes about 10 years to learn how to drive a car well".
I would have laughed at you had you said that to me when I was in my early 20s. At this point, I would smack my 20something self for being stupid.
More likely those people are just not representative of drivers using cell phones. You notice them more, because of selection bias.
Most cell phone drivers are the ones sitting in some random lane, not changing lanes, driving slow and making everyone pass them. They are sitting at red lights after the green, and letting people pass when they should go.
> Conversations can be more distracting than ethanol
However, I don't think distraction is the problem here. A distracted driver can, so some degree, compensate. Everyone has limits, I too have asked people to shut up or told the person on the phone "hold on a second, I need to drive" when a situation got precarious.
On the other hand, I know some bad drivers who have called me and talked for hours and never said such a thing.
But ethanol....thats special. I remember the first time I got drunk. The first clear thought I had was "I am fine, this stuff has no effect on me, I could do anything I normally do". Right after saying this, I stood up...and promptly the room started to spin and I fell back into my seat.
The problem with ethanol is not the famed "reaction time". As my Motorcycle safety and driving instructors both said.... if you are driving so close that raw reaction time matters that much, you are already in trouble.
The problem is that ethanol supresses the ability of most people to judge how impaired they are. An impaired driver can compensate (to a degree anyway), a driver who doesn't feel he is impaired can't.
That is the real danger of ethanol, fuck reaction times. I bet you my grandmother, before her car died, had reaction times as bad as a drunk driver, but, that's why she drove maddeningly slow down the road (I was stuck behind her a few times actually)...she was impaired, she compensated; drunk people often can't do that.
This jives pretty well with the study I have been showing everyone I can which actually studied the individuals who DO get in accidents with cell phones. What it found was that, as a group, they tended to get in more accidents than other drivers; even when not using cell phones!
Not only that but, while it has been found that most drivers using cell phones drive more cautiously; but these drivers in particular tended to drive LESS cautiously when distracted! This pretty clearly pointed to bad drivers with cell phones being more a judgement issue than a distraction issue.
So these findings are pretty unsurprising in light of that. It has been known for a while now that decreasing real phone usage doesn't change accident rates. NY state observed a 60% decrease in the number of drivers on the road observed to be using cell phones.... with no change in its accident rates.
What does the cannon have to say about time lords passing regenerations to eachother?
We saw River Song do this, to which the Doctor remarked "You didn't have to do that", and indicated that she gave up all of her remaining regenerations. My circle of friends has been speculating that this was done to set him up to go past 13, using the regenerations she gave him.... which may also setup a situation where they can switch him to a female and create new cannon, if this is a new situation.
Admittedly, I am no expert on The Doctor and only ever watched a handful of mostly Tom Baker episodes as a kid prior to the new series.... but it seems like it would open up possibilities.
OTOTH does the cannon actually forbid it? Just because its never been seen before doesn't mean it can't happen, just means its potentially rare or requiring of some new element....which they seem to have already set up.
Either or both could be anomolous, I think the data set is undersampled.
However, we did have the incident with River Song saving the doctor. It was said that she gave up all the rest of her regenerations (10 left was it? I forget), he remarked that she didn't need to do that, but as things go in the series, without any explanation as to whether he meant she didn't need to save him or she didn't need to give them ALL up. Its also unclear if he now has his life extended by the number she gave up (one less maybe?).
I do think that will be used as an excuse to continue past a 13th doctor... if so it should refill the series up past 20, but, it also gives a potential plot easy excuse for a female doctor.
Though I agree with some of my friends, though less adamantly than some of them them.... the really tiring thing with the series is how now every companion now is "the most special person who was ever special" as one of my friend's likes to put it.
Thanks, I always have trouble remembering the actual case names. The wikipedia university arm chair legal degree program isn't quite as intensive and all encompassing as law school, but I am sure you know that :)
I wish I could remember what it was, it was a recent decision, past 5 years or so. Your comment on "pretend its a tax" reminded me of it....supreme court struck down some law, but, in the decision, actually gave advice as to how the congress could achieve the same violation of the spirit of the constitution, but without narrowly transgressing against its letter. Seemed bad form to me....but that is about what its come to.... clearly the view is not that they have too much power but, that their power is too restricted and they just need to find a way around these pesky restrictions.
Exactly. And even if they turn their computing power against it, all they can do is erase transactions from the block chain. They still can only generate new transactions if they have the account, and there is nothing that stops the original transactions from re-entering the block chain. In fact, I would assume that the client already deals with this by finding all of the previously accepted transactions that are not in the new chain, and adding them to its pool for the next block.
So unless they already have bought large numbers of bitcoin, they can't even change transactions, all they can do is submit a new block chain that doesn't have some existing transactions; which get immediately added back to the pool for the next block.
Perhaps they are planning this...in fact, maybe all bitcoin really is, is a whole bunch of sting and reverse sting operations where police are unwittingly at both ends of the majority of transactions and propping up the entire currency by doing so?
Beats me but, whoever designed the system definitely didn't think to highly of blindly trusting authorities; and avoided it at very basic levels. The simplicity of the basic rule set that nodes operate under is pure art.
Say what you want about whether its a good currency, or viable in any particular way in the short, mid, or long term. I don't care what the current price or future price is.... as far as a design goes.... its an interesting answer to the question of how you do implement digital cash?
Maybe you don't think its a good idea, or even a good goal. That is fair, but, as an answer, it is beyond working code, and so far serious attacks remain theoretical, and impractical. Give some credit where it is due, somebody did a great job there and has advanced the question of digital cash more than we have seen since DigiCash looked promising.
Even if bitcoin falls apart tomorrow, it will still be an important milestone and it is unlikely to be the last attempt made at digital cash.
Actually, I really like the idea behind namecoin, using proofs of work chains for DNS. No central authority, no domain censorship.
> When has the government ever ruled that it lacks the power to regulate something?
When it relates to shooting children in a school zone. There was, briefly, a federal law punishing use of firearms in a school zone under the idea that since they could regulate commerce, and guns and ammo are sold on the market, it was all good. The Supreme Court, rightfully if you ask me (if the your state can't pass a law against shooting kids, is that really a federal problem?), decided that this did not hold muster.
What pisses me off, of course, is not this ruling, as I said, its a local/state problem at best, and already taken care of by the majority of states, but that it was held up as the first time in 40 years that the commerce clause had struck ANYTHING down.
I mean seriously, this clause has been extended to apply to a farmer who would rather grow his own feed (apparently "not participating in the market" is a market activity and still subject to regulation) than buy it.... using it at all to strike down anything at this point is the height of ridiculousness.
> The motivation behind Bitcoin wasn't to create a currency that government would choose not to
> regulate; it was to create one that government could not regulate.
Exactly. Sure you can effectively regulate many transactions, you can banish it from the legal market. However, the only way bitcoin itself shuts down, is if people stop running the software. In theory (yes its a laughable scenario in any real way) as long as one system exists holding the last good block chain....it can come back.
Bitcoin can only be shut down by voluntary consensus of the community of people running it. It can be relegated to the black market, it can be pushed to obscurity, people caught running it can be railroaded, but, as long as it runs, it runs.
Its a nice hack really. That was what attracted me to it from day one, I read the white paper and a light went off, this is just the next evolution of p2p services,.... they learned from napster and all the others that got shut down and avoided the structural weakness inherent in a single authority.