What objective standard? I have yet to see a workplace where there is such a thing. In places that supposedly judge people on merit, what you see are people being taken advantage of by incompetent brown-nosers. You also see people who hate their jobs, hate the people they work with, and stab each other in the back. You see people being fired despite being perfectly capable of completing their assigned work, and people who know nothing about the work being done being sent in as managers.
What individual objective standard do you think can be applied to programmers? I think we are wise enough to know that lines of code is a stupid standard, and we should (hopefully) be wise enough to know that the number of bugs you fix and the number of bugs you create should not be used either. The only reasonable metric I am familiar with is to judge each team as a whole by how well each team is advancing organizational objectives. Sometimes two programmers can do more when they work together than the sum of what they can do individually (i.e. the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts). Sometimes a mediocre programmer winds up being critical to the success of a team, by maintaining moral, by helping people communicate during meetings, etc.
I suspect that the organizations that understand that programmers do not always work best when they are isolated and encouraged to stab each other in the back are the organizations that are best at developing software. Judging programmers as individuals is suboptimal, because programmers as individuals are often suboptimal. What you are individually best at is probably not enough to develop the best software solution to a given problem.
Why don't we try to strengthen laws for individuals....and make things easier for people to self employ, self incorporate and contract themselves.
In other words, we should encourage people to be hypercompetitive, think only of themselves, and do whatever it takes to defeat their neighbors?
Let each person be responsible for negotiating their own pay rates, etc.
Great plan, if you can first figure out why men from upper-midde-class and higher backgrounds tend to do best when it comes to negotiating pay, and find a way to teach everyone else how to do it.
I am not a feminist, I am not a black guy being kept down by the man, but I am also not going to deny the volumes of research that have found that a certain group of people in society are overwhelmingly better at negotiating their own salaries. There is no denying that collective bargaining is one of the most effective ways to ensure that every employee, regardless of their background, starts their career with a fair salary and receives bonuses/pay raises in a fair way. Outside of collective bargaining, you have to hope that your boss (a) notices those long hours you were pulling and (b) actually takes the time to reward you for it, as opposed to rewarding the less-motivated guy who is better at kissing ass (or who negotiated a better contract, which stipulates that he receives an annual raise regardless of work hours).
Make it easier for people to do their own healthcare, and retirement.....have co-ops out there, etc?
That would be great if people were paid enough to retire on. I am in a "right to work" state where people are being paid less than the amount required to live in the city they work in. Do you think they have money to save for retirement or healthcare?
Again, collective bargaining is effective here, on two levels: it tends to result in better salaries (at least enough to actually live on), and it tends to result in better benefits beyond those salaries (like a health plan and a pension -- if you'll pardon that sort of dirty word).
Why do we keep going down the path of group-think, and putting everyone into the same bowl and treating everyone the same.
Here is some reality for you: even though different people have different abilities, everyone has the same basic needs. No matter how skilled and capable you are, your healthcare needs and costs are no different than those of less-skilled and less-capable people (except, perhaps, in that you are educated enough to know that you should eat your vegetables and avoid tobacco, but I see plenty of smart people who are overweight, who use dangerous drugs like alcohol and tobacco, who do not exercise, etc.). This is not a matter of groupthink, it is a matter of having a society where nobody is told they are unworthy of living.
Give the individual more rights, and put more teeth in laws protecting the individual....not the unions.
How about this: I'll give you a.270 caliber hunting rifle, a year's worth of ammunition, a gun cleaning kit, matches, and a tent. You can see how far your own individual abilities take you when you are in the wilderness on your own.
Or, you can admit that you actually like civilization. Which you already have, by pushing for changes to laws -- and what exactly do you think laws are? (Hint: the law was not handed down by some deity, it is something humans came up with so that we could have better lives. Kind of like unions.)
If payphones are gone then how could someone make anonymous, untraceable calls (if need be)?
Long ago, society forgot that there could ever be a need for such a thing. Ironically, the same police forces that ask for anonymous tips about criminal activity also attacked anonymity systems, claiming that they would only be used by criminals.
But the government has no power over Bitcoin. You could have millions of USD in Bitcoins but as long as you refuse to hand over your wallet, they will never know or be able to prove this. And they will be unable to take it away unless you are locked up for life.
Right, and when I steal that car that you bought with your unregulated currency, you'll have the following choices:
Go to the police, and they'll just say, "What car? You don't have any paperwork to show that you purchased a car."
Find a gun and a group of friends to chase after me, and pray that you actually survive a shootout.
Unless society collapses, the government will always be able to regulate currency, even if for some reason the currency is not being issued by the government.
Well, if you think the government is not going to protect you, I hope you live in a tactically advantageous location, have a stockpile of ammunition and guns, and a magic source of food. If not, then tell me this: what stops me and a group of my friends from coming to your home, killing you, and claiming your property as our own?
See, if we have a dispute like this -- one in which I claim that I am actually the rightful owner of your things -- we can either ask the court (i.e. government) to settle the dispute, or we can let strength settle the dispute. In some places, where the courts are not respected, that is how disputes are settled, and people kill each other all the time (which actually leads to more disputes, and more killing). That is why we have courts, laws, and governments: so that we do not kill each other over disputes.
The many pages amount to, "Other people will accept it!" which is, as I said, typical of scams. At the end of the day, Bitcoin's demand is weak; it is based on false promises of anonymity and is greatly undermined by the inability to use Bitcoin in offline transactions without sacrificing security. The demand for Bitcoin is dwarfed by the demand for government-backed currencies, even within the black market, because the overwhelming majority of people pay taxes and utilize the court system to settle disputes.
I have contributed to the pages of discussion on the subject. I have yet to see a convincing argument for Bitcoin's long-term prospects, nor for Bitcoin ever being more than an obscure Internet toy. The lack of a central issuing authority for Bitcoin is a technical liability: it precludes offline payments that are both secure and scalable (see Chaum's work from the early 90s on that subject), and that becomes an economic liability (see above). Lacking any legal framework, Bitcoin will always suffer from a "demand gap" with government issued currencies, no matter how many people "experiment" with accepting Bitcoin payments.
To put it another way, if you went to court and claimed that I owed you some amount of Bitcoin, the first thing the judge would do is restate the dispute in terms of government backed money. If I lost that dispute, I would be ordered to pay you with that government backed money, and unless I already had enough, I would be forced to sell my Bitcoin tokens for such money. That is the demand gap: nobody will ever be forced by law to sell their government backed money for Bitcoin, but the law does force people to procure currency that is backed by the government, and does so to the degree that almost nobody accepts any other form of money.
It is the same reason why Canadian dollars are not commonly used for trade in the United States, and visa versa. The difference is that there is a large group of people in the world who are legally compelled to use Canadian dollars, and a large group who are legally compelled to use US dollars, and so neither currency is left wanting for demand. It is not that Canadian currency is magically more useful in Canada than it is in the USA; it is a matter of where the Canadian government has authority.
Some amount of tax is good for currency: it creates demand. It creates a believable reason why anyone would want the currency.
Value does not come from scarcity only. There is not much "authentic betterunixthenunix urine" in the world, but I doubt that you would give me anything more than your own urine in exchange for it. Supply and demand are where value comes from, and Bitcoin in particular lacks demand (game currencies don't: you need the game currency to have fun in the game [or to increase the fun or whatever]; note the existence of an authority giving the currency demand and by extension value). Gold was valuable as currency because governments accepted gold for taxes etc.; if the government had not been willing to accept gold, it would just be shiny metal that might fetch some price as metal, but not nearly as much as whatever the government does accept as currency.
Now explain where the demand for Bitcoin comes from. People don't magically start accepting currency; there needs to be a compelling reason for them to do so. Compelling reasons for most currencies are: taxes, the court system, legal tender, and more generally the law. Now, what does Bitcoin have, other than the age-old scam phrase, "Other people will accept it!"
Bitcoin does potetially weaken the power of central banks and governments, transfering it back to the people, the way it was for thousands of years.
Nonsense. At no point in human history has a disorganized group of people had any meaningful currency. Currency is valuable because of authority; societies stay together because there are authorities keeping the peace.
No, it is not fascist to say that. Courts have authority; the reason people don't go around killing each other when they feel like they are owed money or that they were cheated is that we have such authorities, and that we respect their decision. The point of democracy is to ensure that such authority is imposed with the permission of the people living under it.
People did not use gold as currency because it is shiny. It was used because there was no better technology around to prevent counterfeiting, nor was there a good technology for printing money on paper (for that matter, there was no paper). Gold is not the only currency that was used prior to paper money; there is some evidence that clay was used to issue money in ancient Mesopotamia. Beyond very small, ad-hoc schemes, however, the commonality in money since the beginning of civilization is government: money has value because of government.
Yes, see, "medium of exchange" is nice, but why gold over clay, or over tobacco, or some other medium? Why US dollars in the US, but Canadian dollars in Canada? It's not that the government has a gun pointed to your head telling you that you must only use US dollars. It's that things like taxes, court settlements, fees for government services, and so forth all require US dollars; that is where the demand for US dollars comes from. As long as that demand exists somewhere in the world, and as long as the supply of US dollars is not infinite, US dollars have value. Take the US government away, and pretty soon people will realize that US dollars are worthless.
Yes, I know, inflation and blah blah blah. That's a supply issue. Bitcoin has no supply issue, but it has a serious demand issue. The demand for Bitcoin is dwarfed by the demand for government issued currency. Game currencies have more demand than Bitcoin. That is the reason Bitcoin is going to fail in the long run: eventually people are going to realize that they are selling their Bitcoin more than they are buying Bitcoin, and then the scheme will collapse (if deflationary spirals don't kill it first).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole premise of bitcoin to be a currency that has no central authority?
Aside from the serious technical and economic problems that creates, there is nothing about a lack of central issuing authorities that makes Bitcoin impossible to regulate. People do, in fact, rely on the government to do things for them, which is why the government is able to regulate anything at all. You know those daytime court shows, where some celebrity judge settles disputes between ordinary people? That is not just TV; ordinary people do, in fact, have disputes with each other and with the businesses and organizations they interact with, and more often than not those disputes involve money. We use courts to settle those disputes, by respecting the authority of the courts and by allowing the police to arrest people who violate court orders. If everyone started using Bitcoin and coming to courts with disputes over Bitcoin contracts or transactions, the government would be able to regulate Bitcoin; if you failed to bring the proper paperwork to court, showing that you abided by the regulations, you would lose your case and possibly be arrested.
The alternative is to settle disputes with strength, coming at people who owe you Bitcoin (or who you feel owe your Bitcoin) with guns, knives, clubs, rocks, and fists. That would basically lead to the collapse of civilization, and ironically, the collapse of Bitcoin.
Barter is regulated in the United States. You are expected to report large barter transactions on your taxes, and if you fail to do so you could be caught in an audit.
Good luck taking someone to court with a dispute involving an unregulated currency.
Yeah I know, anarchist fantasies about the world of people living without the government. Except that we do not live in a fantasy, we live in the real world where disputes need to be settled and where settling disputes without courts degenerates into violence (see: gang war).
You would still be prosecuted. The real issue is not about individuals versus corporations, it is about wealthy people with powerful political allies versus poor people with no power (same story as in every society).
Sadly, the government founded on enlightenment-era idealism has degenerated into a machine for maintaining the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful.
Of course, for all the courses on logic that lawyers (and by extension, judges) are supposed to take, they still have a very poor understanding of computability theory. I doubt most judges who hear patent cases have even heard of the Curry-Howard isomorphism, the lambda calculus, combinators, logic programming, or even something as a basic as a Turing machine.
What would the point of software patents be if this made it so nobody could ever infringe on one?
How about we say (and I think this is at least in the direction of what Stallman had in mind) that a patent is not infringed if the system that implements the idea is distributed under a free/libre license (GPLv3 style)? I'm not saying it is perfect, but it would be a step in the right direction.
On a smaller scale, my own rights have been affected by proprietary licensing (shortly thereafter I decided to drink the Stallman cool-aid and go all-free). When I was an undergrad, the night before my control systems homework was due, I tried to use Matlab (properly licensed) and I got a message saying that I was not allowed to run the program because too many other people were using it. You would think that running the software on the computer you are using would be the most basic right you could have when it comes to software, yet proprietary licenses can and do deny you that right (and never mind modifying, studying, or copying that software).
"On a computer" is nonsense that does not change a damned thing. Math is math, whether it is "on a computer" or not.
For example the Patent on file compression and encryption, stuff that takes real thought behind it, is good for patent
Spoken like someone who knows nothing of the history of crypto patents, nor of the current status of crypto patents. Patents on crypto were part of the reason good crypto was not baked into the Internet when we had the chance. Patents on crypto today are preventing us from deploying ECC more widely, and cutting edge technologies like IBE and ABE (which is also affected by ECC patents) are locked behind a wall of patents. People have managed to get patents on FHE (even though it is not anywhere near practicality yet), at least one of which was granted before FHE was even known to be possible.
Again, math patents were not supposed to be allowed. Too bad the people who have the power to say "no software patents" have some of the poorest computer science educations in the world.
In fact, the patent system has stayed pretty true to its constitutional footings. I have plenty of policy complaints about some of the details, but overall it does exactly what it's supposed to: grant a strong, limited-time monopoly to inventors.
Except with software. See, with software, patents have been holding us back for decades (yes, decades). The RSA patent was one of the reasons good crypto was not built into the Internet before millions of people started to use the Internet. ECC patents and patents on IBE are hampering real-world crypto deployment right now in 2012.
There were good reasons to make mathematics unpatentable, but our courts, lawyers (like you!), and politicians seem to have forgotten all that.
Most real-world programming work involves solving the same problem over and over again. How many times do programmers get tasks like, "connect this web front-end to a database back-end?"
That does not mean that there are no non-obvious software solutions. Is a sub-cubic time matrix multiplication method obvious to you? Is the FFT obvious? Someone had to discover these algorithms before the rest of us could use them. Here, if you want, is a problem with a non-obvious answer (i.e. it is unsolved): given a set of integers, can an algorithm running in less than quadratic time find three integers from the set whose sum is 0?
There's nothing non-obvious with just about any software
Sorry, I do not support software patents, but this is just wrong. All you need to do is look at a clever algorithm that took a lot of research time to discover to know that that argument is false. I doubt that the majority of/. readers could have come up with the Cooley-Tukey algorithm on their own -- and that is despite the fact that most/. readers are competent programmers. Even among those who could come up with an FFT algorithm on their own, I doubt any would have come up with this without years of work:
Finally, there are a large number of open algorithms problems, whose solution would be, by definition, non-obvious. Can you give me a sub-quadratic-time algorithm for the 3-SUM problem, or for other 3-SUM-hard problems?
Just because most real-world programming work is boring and involves solving the same problems over and over does not mean that all programming is like that.
That is because there is no electronic property; the only property would be the computers themselves, and there is no question about who those belong to. The whole argument is nonsensical from the start, designed to confuse people with a poor abstraction so that they will side with (unsurprisingly) the group that makes the most money from tougher copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret enforcement.
Yeah that's nice, but shouldn't you be working your corporate job and focusing on making yourself wealthier? Nobody is threatening your right to try to climb the ladder (you never really had a right to get anywhere), so stop complaining and get back to work; the big boys need to decide how you will be fed your propa^H^H^H^Hentertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that I did not purchase it, my school purchased it, and to be a student I was required to agree to whatever licenses the school had agreed to.
Specialized tools are necessary for service work
This does not count as a "necessary" specialization of a tool:
If manufacturers must limit themselves to open, standardized interfaces they will be slower in achieving greater emissions and fuel efficiency.
[Citation needed]
It's time to accept the fact that the priority must be emissions and efficiency and not owner's liberty
Therefore, we should ensure that only mechanics who pay the maker of the car a monthly fee can perform repairs!
There is a logical step missing from your argument...
any objective standard
What objective standard? I have yet to see a workplace where there is such a thing. In places that supposedly judge people on merit, what you see are people being taken advantage of by incompetent brown-nosers. You also see people who hate their jobs, hate the people they work with, and stab each other in the back. You see people being fired despite being perfectly capable of completing their assigned work, and people who know nothing about the work being done being sent in as managers.
What individual objective standard do you think can be applied to programmers? I think we are wise enough to know that lines of code is a stupid standard, and we should (hopefully) be wise enough to know that the number of bugs you fix and the number of bugs you create should not be used either. The only reasonable metric I am familiar with is to judge each team as a whole by how well each team is advancing organizational objectives. Sometimes two programmers can do more when they work together than the sum of what they can do individually (i.e. the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts). Sometimes a mediocre programmer winds up being critical to the success of a team, by maintaining moral, by helping people communicate during meetings, etc.
I suspect that the organizations that understand that programmers do not always work best when they are isolated and encouraged to stab each other in the back are the organizations that are best at developing software. Judging programmers as individuals is suboptimal, because programmers as individuals are often suboptimal. What you are individually best at is probably not enough to develop the best software solution to a given problem.
Why don't we try to strengthen laws for individuals....and make things easier for people to self employ, self incorporate and contract themselves.
In other words, we should encourage people to be hypercompetitive, think only of themselves, and do whatever it takes to defeat their neighbors?
Let each person be responsible for negotiating their own pay rates, etc.
Great plan, if you can first figure out why men from upper-midde-class and higher backgrounds tend to do best when it comes to negotiating pay, and find a way to teach everyone else how to do it.
I am not a feminist, I am not a black guy being kept down by the man, but I am also not going to deny the volumes of research that have found that a certain group of people in society are overwhelmingly better at negotiating their own salaries. There is no denying that collective bargaining is one of the most effective ways to ensure that every employee, regardless of their background, starts their career with a fair salary and receives bonuses/pay raises in a fair way. Outside of collective bargaining, you have to hope that your boss (a) notices those long hours you were pulling and (b) actually takes the time to reward you for it, as opposed to rewarding the less-motivated guy who is better at kissing ass (or who negotiated a better contract, which stipulates that he receives an annual raise regardless of work hours).
Make it easier for people to do their own healthcare, and retirement.....have co-ops out there, etc?
That would be great if people were paid enough to retire on. I am in a "right to work" state where people are being paid less than the amount required to live in the city they work in. Do you think they have money to save for retirement or healthcare?
Again, collective bargaining is effective here, on two levels: it tends to result in better salaries (at least enough to actually live on), and it tends to result in better benefits beyond those salaries (like a health plan and a pension -- if you'll pardon that sort of dirty word).
Why do we keep going down the path of group-think, and putting everyone into the same bowl and treating everyone the same.
Here is some reality for you: even though different people have different abilities, everyone has the same basic needs. No matter how skilled and capable you are, your healthcare needs and costs are no different than those of less-skilled and less-capable people (except, perhaps, in that you are educated enough to know that you should eat your vegetables and avoid tobacco, but I see plenty of smart people who are overweight, who use dangerous drugs like alcohol and tobacco, who do not exercise, etc.). This is not a matter of groupthink, it is a matter of having a society where nobody is told they are unworthy of living.
Give the individual more rights, and put more teeth in laws protecting the individual....not the unions.
How about this: I'll give you a .270 caliber hunting rifle, a year's worth of ammunition, a gun cleaning kit, matches, and a tent. You can see how far your own individual abilities take you when you are in the wilderness on your own.
Or, you can admit that you actually like civilization. Which you already have, by pushing for changes to laws -- and what exactly do you think laws are? (Hint: the law was not handed down by some deity, it is something humans came up with so that we could have better lives. Kind of like unions.)
If payphones are gone then how could someone make anonymous, untraceable calls (if need be)?
Long ago, society forgot that there could ever be a need for such a thing. Ironically, the same police forces that ask for anonymous tips about criminal activity also attacked anonymity systems, claiming that they would only be used by criminals.
But the government has no power over Bitcoin. You could have millions of USD in Bitcoins but as long as you refuse to hand over your wallet, they will never know or be able to prove this. And they will be unable to take it away unless you are locked up for life.
Right, and when I steal that car that you bought with your unregulated currency, you'll have the following choices:
Unless society collapses, the government will always be able to regulate currency, even if for some reason the currency is not being issued by the government.
Well, if you think the government is not going to protect you, I hope you live in a tactically advantageous location, have a stockpile of ammunition and guns, and a magic source of food. If not, then tell me this: what stops me and a group of my friends from coming to your home, killing you, and claiming your property as our own?
See, if we have a dispute like this -- one in which I claim that I am actually the rightful owner of your things -- we can either ask the court (i.e. government) to settle the dispute, or we can let strength settle the dispute. In some places, where the courts are not respected, that is how disputes are settled, and people kill each other all the time (which actually leads to more disputes, and more killing). That is why we have courts, laws, and governments: so that we do not kill each other over disputes.
The many pages amount to, "Other people will accept it!" which is, as I said, typical of scams. At the end of the day, Bitcoin's demand is weak; it is based on false promises of anonymity and is greatly undermined by the inability to use Bitcoin in offline transactions without sacrificing security. The demand for Bitcoin is dwarfed by the demand for government-backed currencies, even within the black market, because the overwhelming majority of people pay taxes and utilize the court system to settle disputes.
I have contributed to the pages of discussion on the subject. I have yet to see a convincing argument for Bitcoin's long-term prospects, nor for Bitcoin ever being more than an obscure Internet toy. The lack of a central issuing authority for Bitcoin is a technical liability: it precludes offline payments that are both secure and scalable (see Chaum's work from the early 90s on that subject), and that becomes an economic liability (see above). Lacking any legal framework, Bitcoin will always suffer from a "demand gap" with government issued currencies, no matter how many people "experiment" with accepting Bitcoin payments.
To put it another way, if you went to court and claimed that I owed you some amount of Bitcoin, the first thing the judge would do is restate the dispute in terms of government backed money. If I lost that dispute, I would be ordered to pay you with that government backed money, and unless I already had enough, I would be forced to sell my Bitcoin tokens for such money. That is the demand gap: nobody will ever be forced by law to sell their government backed money for Bitcoin, but the law does force people to procure currency that is backed by the government, and does so to the degree that almost nobody accepts any other form of money.
It is the same reason why Canadian dollars are not commonly used for trade in the United States, and visa versa. The difference is that there is a large group of people in the world who are legally compelled to use Canadian dollars, and a large group who are legally compelled to use US dollars, and so neither currency is left wanting for demand. It is not that Canadian currency is magically more useful in Canada than it is in the USA; it is a matter of where the Canadian government has authority.
More like losing your life to a dispute. Here is what happens when we don't bother with courts to settle our problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder,_Inc.
Too bad everyone is trying to copy this company's "let's stop users from fixing things" strategy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple
Oh sorry, I mean:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.
Some amount of tax is good for currency: it creates demand. It creates a believable reason why anyone would want the currency.
Value does not come from scarcity only. There is not much "authentic betterunixthenunix urine" in the world, but I doubt that you would give me anything more than your own urine in exchange for it. Supply and demand are where value comes from, and Bitcoin in particular lacks demand (game currencies don't: you need the game currency to have fun in the game [or to increase the fun or whatever]; note the existence of an authority giving the currency demand and by extension value). Gold was valuable as currency because governments accepted gold for taxes etc.; if the government had not been willing to accept gold, it would just be shiny metal that might fetch some price as metal, but not nearly as much as whatever the government does accept as currency.
Now explain where the demand for Bitcoin comes from. People don't magically start accepting currency; there needs to be a compelling reason for them to do so. Compelling reasons for most currencies are: taxes, the court system, legal tender, and more generally the law. Now, what does Bitcoin have, other than the age-old scam phrase, "Other people will accept it!"
Bitcoin does potetially weaken the power of central banks and governments, transfering it back to the people, the way it was for thousands of years.
Nonsense. At no point in human history has a disorganized group of people had any meaningful currency. Currency is valuable because of authority; societies stay together because there are authorities keeping the peace.
No, it is not fascist to say that. Courts have authority; the reason people don't go around killing each other when they feel like they are owed money or that they were cheated is that we have such authorities, and that we respect their decision. The point of democracy is to ensure that such authority is imposed with the permission of the people living under it.
People did not use gold as currency because it is shiny. It was used because there was no better technology around to prevent counterfeiting, nor was there a good technology for printing money on paper (for that matter, there was no paper). Gold is not the only currency that was used prior to paper money; there is some evidence that clay was used to issue money in ancient Mesopotamia. Beyond very small, ad-hoc schemes, however, the commonality in money since the beginning of civilization is government: money has value because of government.
Yes, see, "medium of exchange" is nice, but why gold over clay, or over tobacco, or some other medium? Why US dollars in the US, but Canadian dollars in Canada? It's not that the government has a gun pointed to your head telling you that you must only use US dollars. It's that things like taxes, court settlements, fees for government services, and so forth all require US dollars; that is where the demand for US dollars comes from. As long as that demand exists somewhere in the world, and as long as the supply of US dollars is not infinite, US dollars have value. Take the US government away, and pretty soon people will realize that US dollars are worthless.
Yes, I know, inflation and blah blah blah. That's a supply issue. Bitcoin has no supply issue, but it has a serious demand issue. The demand for Bitcoin is dwarfed by the demand for government issued currency. Game currencies have more demand than Bitcoin. That is the reason Bitcoin is going to fail in the long run: eventually people are going to realize that they are selling their Bitcoin more than they are buying Bitcoin, and then the scheme will collapse (if deflationary spirals don't kill it first).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole premise of bitcoin to be a currency that has no central authority?
Aside from the serious technical and economic problems that creates, there is nothing about a lack of central issuing authorities that makes Bitcoin impossible to regulate. People do, in fact, rely on the government to do things for them, which is why the government is able to regulate anything at all. You know those daytime court shows, where some celebrity judge settles disputes between ordinary people? That is not just TV; ordinary people do, in fact, have disputes with each other and with the businesses and organizations they interact with, and more often than not those disputes involve money. We use courts to settle those disputes, by respecting the authority of the courts and by allowing the police to arrest people who violate court orders. If everyone started using Bitcoin and coming to courts with disputes over Bitcoin contracts or transactions, the government would be able to regulate Bitcoin; if you failed to bring the proper paperwork to court, showing that you abided by the regulations, you would lose your case and possibly be arrested.
The alternative is to settle disputes with strength, coming at people who owe you Bitcoin (or who you feel owe your Bitcoin) with guns, knives, clubs, rocks, and fists. That would basically lead to the collapse of civilization, and ironically, the collapse of Bitcoin.
Yeah I know, anarchist fantasies about the world of people living without the government. Except that we do not live in a fantasy, we live in the real world where disputes need to be settled and where settling disputes without courts degenerates into violence (see: gang war).
You would still be prosecuted. The real issue is not about individuals versus corporations, it is about wealthy people with powerful political allies versus poor people with no power (same story as in every society).
Sadly, the government founded on enlightenment-era idealism has degenerated into a machine for maintaining the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful.
theoretical definition of general-purpose computer
Nobody cares about the theory of computation. If they did, there would never have been a software patent, because math is not patentable and this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry-Howard_Correspondence
Of course, for all the courses on logic that lawyers (and by extension, judges) are supposed to take, they still have a very poor understanding of computability theory. I doubt most judges who hear patent cases have even heard of the Curry-Howard isomorphism, the lambda calculus, combinators, logic programming, or even something as a basic as a Turing machine.
What would the point of software patents be if this made it so nobody could ever infringe on one?
How about we say (and I think this is at least in the direction of what Stallman had in mind) that a patent is not infringed if the system that implements the idea is distributed under a free/libre license (GPLv3 style)? I'm not saying it is perfect, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Selling proprietary software does not infringe on someone else's rights
It has in the past:
http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/news/2006/08/71554
On a smaller scale, my own rights have been affected by proprietary licensing (shortly thereafter I decided to drink the Stallman cool-aid and go all-free). When I was an undergrad, the night before my control systems homework was due, I tried to use Matlab (properly licensed) and I got a message saying that I was not allowed to run the program because too many other people were using it. You would think that running the software on the computer you are using would be the most basic right you could have when it comes to software, yet proprietary licenses can and do deny you that right (and never mind modifying, studying, or copying that software).
As for software patents, they can be a good thing
Except that math is not patentable. Oh, yeah, there is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry-Howard_Correspondence
"On a computer" is nonsense that does not change a damned thing. Math is math, whether it is "on a computer" or not.
For example the Patent on file compression and encryption, stuff that takes real thought behind it, is good for patent
Spoken like someone who knows nothing of the history of crypto patents, nor of the current status of crypto patents. Patents on crypto were part of the reason good crypto was not baked into the Internet when we had the chance. Patents on crypto today are preventing us from deploying ECC more widely, and cutting edge technologies like IBE and ABE (which is also affected by ECC patents) are locked behind a wall of patents. People have managed to get patents on FHE (even though it is not anywhere near practicality yet), at least one of which was granted before FHE was even known to be possible.
Again, math patents were not supposed to be allowed. Too bad the people who have the power to say "no software patents" have some of the poorest computer science educations in the world.
In fact, the patent system has stayed pretty true to its constitutional footings. I have plenty of policy complaints about some of the details, but overall it does exactly what it's supposed to: grant a strong, limited-time monopoly to inventors.
Except with software. See, with software, patents have been holding us back for decades (yes, decades). The RSA patent was one of the reasons good crypto was not built into the Internet before millions of people started to use the Internet. ECC patents and patents on IBE are hampering real-world crypto deployment right now in 2012.
There were good reasons to make mathematics unpatentable, but our courts, lawyers (like you!), and politicians seem to have forgotten all that.
Most real-world programming work involves solving the same problem over and over again. How many times do programmers get tasks like, "connect this web front-end to a database back-end?"
That does not mean that there are no non-obvious software solutions. Is a sub-cubic time matrix multiplication method obvious to you? Is the FFT obvious? Someone had to discover these algorithms before the rest of us could use them. Here, if you want, is a problem with a non-obvious answer (i.e. it is unsolved): given a set of integers, can an algorithm running in less than quadratic time find three integers from the set whose sum is 0?
There's nothing non-obvious with just about any software
Sorry, I do not support software patents, but this is just wrong. All you need to do is look at a clever algorithm that took a lot of research time to discover to know that that argument is false. I doubt that the majority of /. readers could have come up with the Cooley-Tukey algorithm on their own -- and that is despite the fact that most /. readers are competent programmers. Even among those who could come up with an FFT algorithm on their own, I doubt any would have come up with this without years of work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppersmith%E2%80%93Winograd_algorithm
Finally, there are a large number of open algorithms problems, whose solution would be, by definition, non-obvious. Can you give me a sub-quadratic-time algorithm for the 3-SUM problem, or for other 3-SUM-hard problems?
Just because most real-world programming work is boring and involves solving the same problems over and over does not mean that all programming is like that.
It doesn't matter if the property is electronic
That is because there is no electronic property; the only property would be the computers themselves, and there is no question about who those belong to. The whole argument is nonsensical from the start, designed to confuse people with a poor abstraction so that they will side with (unsurprisingly) the group that makes the most money from tougher copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret enforcement.
Yeah that's nice, but shouldn't you be working your corporate job and focusing on making yourself wealthier? Nobody is threatening your right to try to climb the ladder (you never really had a right to get anywhere), so stop complaining and get back to work; the big boys need to decide how you will be fed your propa^H^H^H^Hentertainment.