There is no physicality in the packets being transmitted, therefore no "money" changes hands.
Surprisingly enough, none of the state and federal laws and regulations I've seen covering money transmitters and other money service businesses include a "physicality" requirement, so, while this would be a neat argument if the law actually included this rule, as it is it seems to be a rule invented just for the convenience of making the argument, not one which actually relates to the applicable legal reality.
If SETI@Home "units completed" points were called "BitCoins" instead, would the Treasury be going after them?
The applicable laws are much more concerned with how things are used than what they are called.
If they're going to claim that the Bitcoin Foundation is engaged in the business of money transmission, wouldn't it be because they consider them to be the "operator of a payment system"
No; for one thing, I doubt very much that, insofar as it could be considered "an operator of a payment system", it would not be one that operates "between or among people excluded by this section". You seem to have skipped right over that limitation.
Having said that: the same clause in the Constitution prohibits States from recognizing the current U.S. dollar (fiat money) as "money", too
The provision says nothing about "recognizing" or "money", it says something about "making" and "tender in payment of debts". The states do not "make" the US dollar legal tender, Congress did that, as it is power under the Constitution; the states merely follow the federal law in recognizing the result of that act, as they are obligated to under the Supremacy Clause.
In order for California to consider it as money, it would have to declare Bitcoin to be "money", but the Constitutional explicitly prohibits it from doing that.
No, the Constitution prohibits California from making bitcoin "a tender in payment of debts".
It doesn't prohibit California for considering it "money" in the context of any rule where being "money" doesn't make it legal tender.
Not that that matters, because the rules which set the definition of money transmitter that California is applying are federal rules, and they treat any "value that substitutes for currency" the same way as "currency" or "funds", and the federal agency responsible for enforcing the regulations has already detailed their application to de-centralized exchanges of virtual currencies, so, even if there was an issue of the reserved federal power to define legal tender involved, California would be fine because it is simply following the Feds, not establishing its own definition.
MTGOX doesn't transfer money, it exchanges money for goods. Unless California is saying Bitcoin is a legitimate currency.
California is applying the rules of the federal regulations on money services businesses, which require state licensure of money transmitters. Those regulations -- 31 CFR Sec. 1010.100(ff)(5)(i)(A) -- define a "money transmitter" as one who provides "the acceptance of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency from one person and the transmission of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency to another location or person by any means."
Bitcoin doesn't need to be a "legitimate currency" for an exchange which accepts dollars, keeps accounts in dollars and bitcoins, exchanges one for the other, and transmits dollars and bitcoins back to people to qualify as a money transmitter under the rules.
You can get RON-100 fuel for automotive engines that are lead free, why cant the same be done for Avgas?
Its at least a problem, given that this isn't the first FAA effort in this direction, and, per TFA, they've already tested 279 proposed "drop-in" replacement fuels without finding one that is completely acceptable.
No, they are not asking for workable new fuels, because there is no substitute for lead for the older engines.
Whether or not you are correct that "there is no substitute", they are, in fact, asking for workable new fuels. FTFA:
The Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today asked the world’s fuel producers to submit proposals for fuel options that would help the general aviation industry make a transition to an unleaded fuel. The FAA is committed to the development of a new unleaded fuel by 2018 that would minimize the impact of replacing 100 octane low-lead fuel for most of the general aviation fleet.
You also forgot to mention (though you likely know) that getting a STC (Supplemental Type Certificate) for an Unleaded Gasoline engine in the hundreds of models that are still using 100LL is going to take many millions of dollars and years of testing and paperwork to push through the certifying authority, which also happens to be the authority trying to force the issue.
Yeah, its a good thing that the FAA isn't talking about new engines at all, but instead calling on fuel producers to come up with replacement fuels that will work in current engines. Which is stated not only in TFA, which I can understand is a huge bother to read before complaining, but in the first sentence of the summary, as well.
So in 6 years, the FAA expects 167,000 aircraft owners to swap the engines in their aircraft for an unleaded engine?
No, and you can tell this from the first line in TFS: "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) this week put out a call to fuel producers to offer options that would safely let general aviation aircraft stop using leaded fuel by 2018."
They want fuel producers to offer options that will meet the need of aircraft that are currently dependent on leaded fuel to operate properly without lead.
And as a small single engine plane owner myself, I'll be damned if the government forces me to spend 30K on swapping out a new engine
I get that its a lot to ask you buy a new engine, or even to RTFA, but could you at least bother to read the first sentence of the summary before exploding with outrage next time?
Exactly. not every valid URL has a top level domain, and this can consistently confuse browsers who have the UI error of using an address bar for searches.
Only if they make the fundamental implementation error of not defaulting to resolving the address bar entry as an address first, and only if it is unresolvable as an address resorting to search.
Which, I would argue, is the only error involved, not the error of having a unified "what do yo want" bar that can be used either to provide an address or a search query.
I wonder what part of "national sales tax" you missed. Everyone gets to pay sales tax on internet purchases going forward.
While that's what you'd think from the words "national sales tax", it is completely wrong. "National sales tax" is an inaccurate label (just like the more popular "internet sales tax" for the same measure was.)
The actual measure at issue that has been dishonestly described as a "national sales tax" or "internet sales tax" is federal legislation specifying particular conditions under which states can require out-of-state merchants to collect sales and use tax on sales into the state. It is not, itself, a tax of any kind, and the taxes under it are neither national taxes, nor are they taxes specific to the internet.
Why assume the use case is gaming? This is just as applicable for home theater as well as gaming.
Yes, GP is just as relevant with "home theater" included in the one place gaming is mentioned; the basic point is there are plenty of use cases that aren't like the ones, including gaming, as -- as you note -- home theater, where refresh rate is key.
If you're constrained by space, then it's probably because you're in an office environment, meaning they're targeting the enterprise with this size and price-point.
I don't see this, except taking "office" in the broadest possible sense; I mean I could just see moving from a 24" to a 32" monitor for the desktop in the extra bedroom that serves as my home office/library/miscellaneous storage room, but a 50" display would be enormous.
For home users, the 50" screen at a lower price-point makes way more sense.
For living room- (equivalently, conference room-) style use, I'd say 50" is better. For desktop-style use, 32" is better. Both styles are found both in "office" settings and "home" settings.
What's the point of this? We won't have an effective way to properly drive these displays at a meaningful refresh rate.
Not every use case is gaming. There are plenty of uses where more resolution would be worth trading off refresh rate. Obviously, if you can have both together, that's better, but refresh rate isn't always the key feature.
Zero tolerance policies were demanded by parents who wanted to address the symptom (bullying), not the problem (their child).
I doubt it -- every single "zero tolerance" policy I've seen on any subject (bullying included, but hardly uniquely) has been proposed by administrators largely as a way of minimizing their own responsibility for applying discretion appropriately to individual circumstances (and, particularly, of making it harder for them to be challenged for inappropriate punishments meted out for reasons, such as racial/ethnic discrimination, other than the officially stated one.) Sure, they are often motivated by parents demanding that something be done, and "zero tolerance" is often an impressive-sounding way of saying you are doing something, but the choice of that something is all about having a shield to hide behind, not actually being effective (or doing what people want, for that matter.)
And, in practice, the actual enforcement is often as arbitrary and poorly-exercising discretion as prior to zero-tolerance policies, but its harder for those arbitrarily punished to challenge the actions because instead of showing that the punishment was excessive in their particular case (which, under zero tolerance policies, it usually is not on its face), they need to actually be able to show that the supposedly-universal policy is inconsistently applied, which is much harder to do (because its hard to even get access to the evidence necessary to show this.)
If that's how Italy wants to play the game, then Facebook should just require that all Italian nationals provide government identification in order to use Facebook.
I'm sure the Italian government would like that. Facebook wouldn't, because Facebook wants to make it easy to use Facebook.
Yes, this may mean that many business simply won't be able to do business in Italy. Oh well. Italy can suffer for its own stupidity I suppose.
I'm not sure having increased friction to sign-up on Facebook is really "suffering" in any meaningful sense.
Well you won't be fine with it since the mail client has already been taken out
Has it been "taken out" or "not yet ported to the new Chromium-based system"? I mean, I would suspect that early releases of Chromium-based Opera Next are going to be missing features that are both in the current stable Opera and planned for inclusion in the stable release of Opera Next.
PETA's position is that we ought not kill any animals any where. But they kill 95% of the pets entrusted to their care.
Sure, they say that killing is bad, but they also -- openly -- say that domestication and keeping animals as pets is also wrong (and go so far as to say that animals are better off dead than kept as pets.) So I don't think there is any inconsistency of actions with statements, though obviously the actions here aren't ones they want publicized, given that they do depend on financial support from people who don't pay attention to much more than the surface image of PETA of being vaguely "for animal rights" without paying attention to any of the details of what they state about their values.
They want few people who paid ~3x as much as an existing competing android product (that is really cool and works) to void their warrantee to make new stuff for them.
I think they want people to build stuff to the stock Glass APIs. They are willing to allow users who want to do additional experimentation to do so freely (as long as those users, not Google, are responsible if they make the device unusable in the process). There is a crucial distinction there.
Very likely, they're talking about the CPU using 50% less power.
Very likely, they aren't, since they make specific claims about CPU power under different regimes and all of them are much more significant than that, and then go on to say that the CPUs will enable laptops using them to have 50% greater battery life.
With as much hype as Google is trying to create for an existing product by another manufacturer, you'd think they'd give a little more leeway for innovation.
More than giving you complete freedom to mess with it, but saying that, if you break it in the process, they aren't going to assume responsibility?
Slashdot Mirror
Surprisingly enough, none of the state and federal laws and regulations I've seen covering money transmitters and other money service businesses include a "physicality" requirement, so, while this would be a neat argument if the law actually included this rule, as it is it seems to be a rule invented just for the convenience of making the argument, not one which actually relates to the applicable legal reality.
The applicable laws are much more concerned with how things are used than what they are called.
No; for one thing, I doubt very much that, insofar as it could be considered "an operator of a payment system", it would not be one that operates "between or among people excluded by this section". You seem to have skipped right over that limitation.
The provision says nothing about "recognizing" or "money", it says something about "making" and "tender in payment of debts". The states do not "make" the US dollar legal tender, Congress did that, as it is power under the Constitution; the states merely follow the federal law in recognizing the result of that act, as they are obligated to under the Supremacy Clause.
No, the Constitution prohibits California from making bitcoin "a tender in payment of debts".
It doesn't prohibit California for considering it "money" in the context of any rule where being "money" doesn't make it legal tender.
Not that that matters, because the rules which set the definition of money transmitter that California is applying are federal rules, and they treat any "value that substitutes for currency" the same way as "currency" or "funds", and the federal agency responsible for enforcing the regulations has already detailed their application to de-centralized exchanges of virtual currencies, so, even if there was an issue of the reserved federal power to define legal tender involved, California would be fine because it is simply following the Feds, not establishing its own definition.
California is applying the rules of the federal regulations on money services businesses, which require state licensure of money transmitters. Those regulations -- 31 CFR Sec. 1010.100(ff)(5)(i)(A) -- define a "money transmitter" as one who provides "the acceptance of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency from one person and the transmission of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency to another
location or person by any means."
Bitcoin doesn't need to be a "legitimate currency" for an exchange which accepts dollars, keeps accounts in dollars and bitcoins, exchanges one for the other, and transmits dollars and bitcoins back to people to qualify as a money transmitter under the rules.
> Because they believe that Google should be at the front line of essentially censoring the internet to only return things they feel are 'acceptable'.
Which, given that Google has voluntarily taken on this general role, is simply a debate over what the standards for "acceptability" are.
Its at least a problem, given that this isn't the first FAA effort in this direction, and, per TFA, they've already tested 279 proposed "drop-in" replacement fuels without finding one that is completely acceptable.
Whether or not you are correct that "there is no substitute", they are, in fact, asking for workable new fuels. FTFA:
Yeah, its a good thing that the FAA isn't talking about new engines at all, but instead calling on fuel producers to come up with replacement fuels that will work in current engines. Which is stated not only in TFA, which I can understand is a huge bother to read before complaining, but in the first sentence of the summary, as well.
No, and you can tell this from the first line in TFS: "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) this week put out a call to fuel producers to offer options that would safely let general aviation aircraft stop using leaded fuel by 2018."
They want fuel producers to offer options that will meet the need of aircraft that are currently dependent on leaded fuel to operate properly without lead.
I get that its a lot to ask you buy a new engine, or even to RTFA, but could you at least bother to read the first sentence of the summary before exploding with outrage next time?
Or, for that matter, mailto:intranet ?
Only if they make the fundamental implementation error of not defaulting to resolving the address bar entry as an address first, and only if it is unresolvable as an address resorting to search.
Which, I would argue, is the only error involved, not the error of having a unified "what do yo want" bar that can be used either to provide an address or a search query.
While that's what you'd think from the words "national sales tax", it is completely wrong. "National sales tax" is an inaccurate label (just like the more popular "internet sales tax" for the same measure was.)
The actual measure at issue that has been dishonestly described as a "national sales tax" or "internet sales tax" is federal legislation specifying particular conditions under which states can require out-of-state merchants to collect sales and use tax on sales into the state. It is not, itself, a tax of any kind, and the taxes under it are neither national taxes, nor are they taxes specific to the internet.
Yes, GP is just as relevant with "home theater" included in the one place gaming is mentioned; the basic point is there are plenty of use cases that aren't like the ones, including gaming, as -- as you note -- home theater, where refresh rate is key.
I don't see this, except taking "office" in the broadest possible sense; I mean I could just see moving from a 24" to a 32" monitor for the desktop in the extra bedroom that serves as my home office/library/miscellaneous storage room, but a 50" display would be enormous.
For living room- (equivalently, conference room-) style use, I'd say 50" is better. For desktop-style use, 32" is better. Both styles are found both in "office" settings and "home" settings.
Not every use case is gaming. There are plenty of uses where more resolution would be worth trading off refresh rate. Obviously, if you can have both together, that's better, but refresh rate isn't always the key feature.
Well, presumably, because your use case isn't appropriate for a 50" display.
I doubt it -- every single "zero tolerance" policy I've seen on any subject (bullying included, but hardly uniquely) has been proposed by administrators largely as a way of minimizing their own responsibility for applying discretion appropriately to individual circumstances (and, particularly, of making it harder for them to be challenged for inappropriate punishments meted out for reasons, such as racial/ethnic discrimination, other than the officially stated one.) Sure, they are often motivated by parents demanding that something be done, and "zero tolerance" is often an impressive-sounding way of saying you are doing something, but the choice of that something is all about having a shield to hide behind, not actually being effective (or doing what people want, for that matter.)
And, in practice, the actual enforcement is often as arbitrary and poorly-exercising discretion as prior to zero-tolerance policies, but its harder for those arbitrarily punished to challenge the actions because instead of showing that the punishment was excessive in their particular case (which, under zero tolerance policies, it usually is not on its face), they need to actually be able to show that the supposedly-universal policy is inconsistently applied, which is much harder to do (because its hard to even get access to the evidence necessary to show this.)
I'm sure the Italian government would like that. Facebook wouldn't, because Facebook wants to make it easy to use Facebook.
I'm not sure having increased friction to sign-up on Facebook is really "suffering" in any meaningful sense.
Has it been "taken out" or "not yet ported to the new Chromium-based system"? I mean, I would suspect that early releases of Chromium-based Opera Next are going to be missing features that are both in the current stable Opera and planned for inclusion in the stable release of Opera Next.
Sure, they say that killing is bad, but they also -- openly -- say that domestication and keeping animals as pets is also wrong (and go so far as to say that animals are better off dead than kept as pets.) So I don't think there is any inconsistency of actions with statements, though obviously the actions here aren't ones they want publicized, given that they do depend on financial support from people who don't pay attention to much more than the surface image of PETA of being vaguely "for animal rights" without paying attention to any of the details of what they state about their values.
I think they want people to build stuff to the stock Glass APIs. They are willing to allow users who want to do additional experimentation to do so freely (as long as those users, not Google, are responsible if they make the device unusable in the process). There is a crucial distinction there.
Very likely, they aren't, since they make specific claims about CPU power under different regimes and all of them are much more significant than that, and then go on to say that the CPUs will enable laptops using them to have 50% greater battery life.
More than giving you complete freedom to mess with it, but saying that, if you break it in the process, they aren't going to assume responsibility?
Imperial or US Customary? The two systems are not identical, though they share many units (and slightly more names of units than actual units.)