I realized after I submitted that post that I sound like I am saying that professors should be working for free; what I was actually criticizing is the practice of professors requiring their students to buy copies of their book, to rake in additional royalties. The way I see it, universities should pay professors to write books -- perhaps considering it during tenure review, or giving professors a year away from teaching -- and those books should then be made available online at no cost to students.
Why aren't the scientists copyrighting or putting their work into the public domain prior to submission?
Some do, especially in computer science; see, for example, the cryptology eprint archive. Consider, however, the guidelines for publishing a paper in the Journal of Algebra:
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.
In case you were wondering who the copyright holder is:
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement.
Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions). If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions.
Basically, if you publish an article in this journal, you must give them the copyright, and your submission will be rejected if you published the article previously, including publishing in the public domain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; an unscrupulous scientist might try to publish the same paper in many journals, and make it appear that he has done more work than he actually has. However, in the current system of copyrights and academic publishers, this has the side effect of ensuring that a scientist cannot make his journal articles available to the public at no cost.
Note that the peer review process does not need to be facilitated by academic publishing companies. Universities could organize peer review, and universities could publish journals online at no cost. Universities are also in a position to give researchers incentives to participate -- tenure review, bonus pay, etc. The only reason publishing companies came about in the first place was to meet the needs of scientists to have their work distributed to other scientists; now that we have the Internet, we really do not need publishing companies at all.
This is an issue that scientists should care about. In theory, scientists do their work to advance the state of human knowledge; this necessarily means making that new knowledge available to others. Right now, most scientific papers are unavailable to anyone who is not a scientist, with publishers demanding absurd fees for access.
Why do we need academic publishing companies at all? Everything they do can be done by universities working together over the Internet, and the lower costs could help reduce tuition rates.
Assuming, of course, that the goal universities and the professors they employ is to educate people. There are a scary number of professors who write textbooks in order to make money, rather than to communicate their knowledge to students.
Both the Labour Party and the Tories in the UK are really into deploying surveillance-tech on ordinary people. So it doesn't matter who wins elections
We have exactly the same situation here in the United States; the two major parties work to further the same causes, and ordinary people are the losers. Unlike the UK, the US adds a special twist: there is a high probability that you will be incarcerated (world's largest prison population), and that probability higher if you are a (not wealthy) man, and even higher if you are black.
Who thought that blocking a comedy website that avoids "bad words," makes only mild references to sexuality, and shows only mild cartoon violence was a good idea?
What Tor is is a network allowing for file exchange which makes it impossible or very difficult to tell the identity of the file sharers
Who told you that? Tor is an anonymity system for TCP/IP, which is primarily used for HTTP. It is frequently used to defeat national firewalls in countries like China and the UK; it is no surprise that these countries try to block it. It is embarrassing that a member of the free world is resorting to the tactics that we see out of China, but that is sort of the point of TFA.
Where is that? We have a free/libre operating system that is useful and secure, which supports modern features and which is widely used. GNU/Linux showed the world that you can have a good operating system without proprietary licensing.
OSX is the best OS out there today with no doubt
I will raise some doubts about that. I need an OS that is not going to try to thwart me when I debug programs:
It is a matter of what is best for the rest of society. Computers are basically the most important communication tool in industrialized nations, and we have every right to expect that our computers will do what we want them to do -- without first having to ask permission from the person who made the computer. Apple has already shown that they are willing to use their power over the app store to engage in political censorship. How can we have a free society if our ability to communicate can be hampered?
Sure, it is "not so bad" -- it is not as if iProducts will filter your web results, though there is nothing stopping Apple from doing such a thing -- but it is an attack on free expression. Just because there are other options out there does not mean that Apple should not be criticized; they are extremely powerful as a corporation and they are a market leader.
They do not need to go that far. They can just drop the "only software we approved" system, end the censorship, and let people control their computers.
Apple's lock down lost any claim to credibility when they started censoring political cartoons. This is about control and ultimately cash flow, not quality.
You are still thinking in terms of legal tender and fractional reserve banking, a system like this need not rise up around bitcoin as it consists of infinitely divisible units and does not require any special legal status to be useful to people.
I would say that in the long run, the only reason any currency is useful is because of the legal structure that surrounds it. Governments collect taxes -- which law abiding citizens must pay -- and they only collect taxes in particular currencies. Courts assess damages in terms of some currency; bankruptcy courts must also use some currency to decide how to liquidate assets. These are all part of the legal structure that helps give money value, by creating demand: there are people in society who need money to satisfy legal requirements.
It has nothing to do with what sort of banking system you use or how your money is created. The point is about the demand for money, without which it would have no value (likewise with supply, but there is no question about how money is supplied). Bitcoin also has sources of demand, but these sources are much weaker than the legal system.
The reason people would hoard their money under the mattress rather than in deposit accounts is because they don't trust the banks have the money.
Sure, but that sort of activity is discouraged by inflationary trends, which cause the mattress full of money to lose value over time. You would see a lot more hoarding if deflation were the norm; it would, in fact, be advantageous to hoard money, as interest paid on a bank account would have to be negative for banks to be able to profit (in the extreme case). You seem to be arguing that Bitcoin would create a system in which there are no banks; that suggests that no loans would ever be issued (which is, after all, the primary and oldest function of banks).
I think you are suggesting that for bitcoin to be successful it would have to be the only currency used by people. I don't think we should assume this. It can fill the niche that credit/debit cards and paypal fill now.
Except that to (competitively) fill that niche, Bitcoin must:
Ensure parity with some nation's currency, so that people can easily switch between Bitcoin and whatever their boss is giving them.
Allow people to securely make fast transactions; people routinely use credit/debit cards to buy groceries, and they will not want to wait 10 minutes for their transactions to be verified. Clearing houses will help if and only if their fees are no higher than credit processing fees; whether such a thing could even be profitable remains to be seen.
Maintain enough liquidity that people do not simply hoard their Bitcoins while continuing to employ other systems. Bitcoin's deflationary nature makes such liquidity even harder to achieve.
So, the problem is not with deflationary currency per se, it is that deflationary currencies have been deemed to be incompatible with the current FRB, debt-backed, single currency system due to fear of the deflationary spiral phenomenon you describe.
The problem is, in fact, deflationary currency. Debt is part of any economy; sometimes people need loans in order to weather difficult seasons, start new businesses, etc. Debt is not some new economic phenomenon: debt was common at the time the bible was written, with biblical passages referring to loans without bothering to explain how loans work. You will never create an economy without any debt, and deflationary spirals are a problem in any system where people have to repay debts, regardless of whether the currency is backed by physical assets, cryptography, or the law.
It is hard to make a good case for deflation, simply because deflation encourages hoarding and thus robs money of its only real utility. Money is only useful when it is traded; a pile of dollar bills has little use ex
If conserving and saving for the future or only buying things you really want or need is bad for an economy then perhaps there is something wrong with the way the economy is structured.
There is a difference between saving and hoarding. When you save money, it does not just disappear from the economy; it can be used by others, and you are paid some amount of interest for what amounts to a loan. Now, this is a simplified version of the banking system -- there are tons of regulations on how your money can be used by the bank -- but at the basic level, putting money in a bank account does not harm the economy. Hoarding, on the other hand, takes money out of circulation; it is like having a pile of cash in a mattress.
Deflation encourages hoarding, and hoarding encourages deflation. It can become a disaster for an economy, basically halting spending and in the worst case causing currency to fail or be replaced (ironically making the hoarded money worth even less than it was before the crisis). These sorts of spirals are disastrous for anyone who has a loan, as it makes it very hard to find the money needed to repay the loan, which further contributes to the problem by increasing the demand for currency even further. Bitcoin adds another dimension to deflationary spirals: there is a hard limit on the amount of Bitcoin currency that can be in circulation at any given time, and so it is basically impossible to correct a deflationary spiral; it must run its course, even if that creates a catastrophic failure (note that a government correcting a deflationary spiral does not necessarily lead to inflation; the government is equally capable of taking money back out of circulation when the crisis is averted.).
So solutions exist but rely on governments to implement them
Strictly speaking, the solutions rely on banks; the government only has to stay out of the way. This, unfortunately, creates a political problem: the government needs to stay out of the way, but that means dropping a number of far-right policies that have been pushed for a few decades now. In the USA, large cash transactions are automatically reported to the DEA (note that this is not the IRS or the Treasury), which creates a big problem for digital cash deployment -- a person might reasonably make a large electronic payment using digital cash, without the convenient paper trail.
If you need escrow, chargebacks, etc then you pay extra. With bitcoin people have a choice, the guy at the gas station I use every week doesn't have the choice of waiving cc fraud protection if he believes it unnecessary for customers he knows.
The guy at the gas station has the choice of issuing loans on his own if he wants -- if he knows a person really does live around the corner and really will come back with the $10 he is short on, he can trust the person to do so. Credit cards are provided by banks as a service; that service comes with fees, just like a Bitcoin clearing house would come with fees. The difference with Bitcoin is that the guy at the gas station has no choice when it comes to being connected to the Internet; he must have an always-on, high-speed connection, and he must pay for it, whether or not he makes use of additional services.
True, but anonymity isn't the primary goal of the bitcoin project, I am not sure why it gets so much attention. The point stands that it is still better at this than what people are currently using for online purchases.
Anonymity is one of the main sources of demand for Bitcoin, that is why it receives so much attention. People want to make electronic payments without leaving a paper trail, and that is why they gravitate towards Bitcoin. It is true that Bitcoin offers better anonymity than other popular payment systems; it would be better still if we used a digital cash system that did not require people to take special steps to ensure their anonymity.
Otherwise known as "hoarding," which is extremely bad for an economy as it discourages trade. Deflation also discourages credit, which like it or not is an economic necessity.
There are many times I wish places accepted bitcoin or similar rather than a cc or paypal.
OK, but the government has absolutely no reason to accept Bitcoin payments. I understand the Bitcoin is popular among anarchists who love the idea of money without governments or large banks, but the fact is that money -- even gold coins -- gets is value from the legal structure that surrounds it. Bitcoin does not have any legal structure surrounding it; if you try to sue someone over a Bitcoin transaction, the first thing the court will do is convert all your Bitcoin values into whatever currency your government issues. At least in the USA, Bitcoin transactions would actually be considered barter for any legal purpose, and thus would be converted to dollar transactions when it comes to taxes, lawsuits, and so forth. This is why demand for Bitcoin will always be weak: people have to live with their government, and no government has a reason to use Bitcoin.
People will figure this [secure offline transactions] out if it ever becomes worthwhile.
People already figured out how to make secure offline transactions, over a decade before Bitcoin was even envisioned. Look at the work of Chaum or Okamoto, who presented digital cash systems that were secure and provided offline transactions (meaning that no network beyond the connection between the parties engaged in the transaction is required; imagine inserting a smart card into a cash register). Chaum proved that any digital cash system that offers secure offline transactions will result in tokens that grow linearly in the length of the transaction chain; this basically implies a need for a central authority that can issue fresh, unused tokens.
There were reasons that these systems were not deployed, but they had nothing to do with technology or economics -- in fact, both of those weigh strongly in favor of those systems. The problem is politics, as major world governments basically do not care about computer or even financial security, and are much more interested in being able to watch every transaction that is made. This is not a problem that Bitcoin will solve, since governments can either attack the anonymity of Bitcoin (practically guaranteed to happen if it ever becomes a blip on the radar) or simply ban it altogether -- which would make it impossible to have money exit the system, which people will need to do if they want to buy anything legally.
Escrow services, mt gox codes, reputation
All of which add costs to transactions, which necessitates even more demand for Bitcoin to compete -- which is already a problem for Bitcoin. What you are thinking of is a Bitcoin clearing house, where some service takes on the risk of a double spending attack. People do not take on risk at no cost. Reputation is not something that scales well without a service e.g. a credit rating agency, which also adds costs.
It can be if you know what you are doing. It is definitely much more anonymous than using cc's online or to order food etc.
It is, however, less anonymous than paper money, and less anonymous than Chaum-style systems. It is also a bad idea to rely on people to know what they are doing; see email encryption, trojan horse malware, etc.
Your economic "disadvantages" are pretty much opinion at this point
No, they are real and they are serious. Deflationary currencies are dangerous and run the risk of deflationary spirals, where loans are defaulted on and people stop spending their money. Deflation hurts the liquidity of currency, which undermines the currency's usefulness. Having to wait 10 minutes, having to
In the U.S. I live in, practically everyone and their grandmom is on Facebook
I also live in the US, and guess what? Neither I, nor my mother, nor my grandparents have Facebook. Neither do several of my coworkers, including several who quit the site.
Don't be so quick to assume that everyone has a Facebook account.
When a site has ~800 million active users, you can generally expect that the person you want to communicate with is using that company's services
Considering that there are an estimated 2.25 billion people who use the Internet, I would say that with 800 million users, the probability that the person you want to communicate with is actually on Facebook is a little more than 1 in 3...
The little people get to wait for the important people -- like the Olympic committee, or in the future perhaps anyone with enough money -- when the city changes its traffic patterns for them. After all, it is not really equality if the important people have to wait for red lights just like everyone else, right?
As for emergency vehicles, I live in a small city right now that manages to give them green lights without a special CCTV system. Each traffic light has a sensor that detects sirens/flashers and changes the light appropriately; it may sound surprising, but this is actually a reliable, well-engineered system.
We have big events here too -- the college football team's games draw big crowds from neighboring towns. CCTV is not needed for that either; police can simply disable traffic lights at appropriate locations and direct traffic as needed. Perhaps this is more than London could be expected to do, given how large of a city they are, but somehow I doubt it -- they have a much larger police force than we have.
Really, the benefit of the CCTV system for traffic control is overstated here. What London is really showing the world is that when important people are in their city, they can give those people priority as if they were an emergency vehicle, and they can do so discretely. People might complain if police officers started waving through businessmen and politicians, but nobody can complain about the light changing, and there is no need for rich people to attach flashers to their cars.
When I was in high school (a decade ago), I had a friend who managed to send/receive 14000 text messages in a single month. I have no idea how that is possible, but his parents took away his phone privileges after that.
Slashdot Mirror
I realized after I submitted that post that I sound like I am saying that professors should be working for free; what I was actually criticizing is the practice of professors requiring their students to buy copies of their book, to rake in additional royalties. The way I see it, universities should pay professors to write books -- perhaps considering it during tenure review, or giving professors a year away from teaching -- and those books should then be made available online at no cost to students.
Why aren't the scientists copyrighting or putting their work into the public domain prior to submission?
Some do, especially in computer science; see, for example, the cryptology eprint archive. Consider, however, the guidelines for publishing a paper in the Journal of Algebra:
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.
In case you were wondering who the copyright holder is:
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement. Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions). If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions.
Basically, if you publish an article in this journal, you must give them the copyright, and your submission will be rejected if you published the article previously, including publishing in the public domain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; an unscrupulous scientist might try to publish the same paper in many journals, and make it appear that he has done more work than he actually has. However, in the current system of copyrights and academic publishers, this has the side effect of ensuring that a scientist cannot make his journal articles available to the public at no cost.
Note that the peer review process does not need to be facilitated by academic publishing companies. Universities could organize peer review, and universities could publish journals online at no cost. Universities are also in a position to give researchers incentives to participate -- tenure review, bonus pay, etc. The only reason publishing companies came about in the first place was to meet the needs of scientists to have their work distributed to other scientists; now that we have the Internet, we really do not need publishing companies at all.
This is an issue that scientists should care about. In theory, scientists do their work to advance the state of human knowledge; this necessarily means making that new knowledge available to others. Right now, most scientific papers are unavailable to anyone who is not a scientist, with publishers demanding absurd fees for access.
Why do we need academic publishing companies at all? Everything they do can be done by universities working together over the Internet, and the lower costs could help reduce tuition rates.
Assuming, of course, that the goal universities and the professors they employ is to educate people. There are a scary number of professors who write textbooks in order to make money, rather than to communicate their knowledge to students.
Both the Labour Party and the Tories in the UK are really into deploying surveillance-tech on ordinary people. So it doesn't matter who wins elections
We have exactly the same situation here in the United States; the two major parties work to further the same causes, and ordinary people are the losers. Unlike the UK, the US adds a special twist: there is a high probability that you will be incarcerated (world's largest prison population), and that probability higher if you are a (not wealthy) man, and even higher if you are black.
Who thought that blocking a comedy website that avoids "bad words," makes only mild references to sexuality, and shows only mild cartoon violence was a good idea?
What Tor is is a network allowing for file exchange which makes it impossible or very difficult to tell the identity of the file sharers
Who told you that? Tor is an anonymity system for TCP/IP, which is primarily used for HTTP. It is frequently used to defeat national firewalls in countries like China and the UK; it is no surprise that these countries try to block it. It is embarrassing that a member of the free world is resorting to the tactics that we see out of China, but that is sort of the point of TFA.
Believe me, I have no doubt about any of that; my point was only that Apple has not yet gotten as bad as IBM was in the 60s and 70s.
where Linux failed
Where is that? We have a free/libre operating system that is useful and secure, which supports modern features and which is widely used. GNU/Linux showed the world that you can have a good operating system without proprietary licensing.
OSX is the best OS out there today with no doubt
I will raise some doubts about that. I need an OS that is not going to try to thwart me when I debug programs:
https://blogs.oracle.com/ahl/entry/mac_os_x_and_the
I also need an OS that will not refuse to run on hardware that was not produced by Apple.
Sure, there is room for improvement with GNU/Linux; that is not a result of deliberate efforts to prevent users from doing what they want to do.
It is a matter of what is best for the rest of society. Computers are basically the most important communication tool in industrialized nations, and we have every right to expect that our computers will do what we want them to do -- without first having to ask permission from the person who made the computer. Apple has already shown that they are willing to use their power over the app store to engage in political censorship. How can we have a free society if our ability to communicate can be hampered?
Sure, it is "not so bad" -- it is not as if iProducts will filter your web results, though there is nothing stopping Apple from doing such a thing -- but it is an attack on free expression. Just because there are other options out there does not mean that Apple should not be criticized; they are extremely powerful as a corporation and they are a market leader.
This is much more restrictive than any other general computing platform ever
I am not sure that is true; consider how bad things were before PCs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing
At least you do not have to pay Apple by the month to use an iPad.
They do not need to go that far. They can just drop the "only software we approved" system, end the censorship, and let people control their computers.
Apple's lock down lost any claim to credibility when they started censoring political cartoons. This is about control and ultimately cash flow, not quality.
Well, I suppose that rights are not really relevant anymore, but in theory we have the right to sue the government.
It is not censorship when you insist that only scientific conclusions be heard during debates about scientific issues.
You are still thinking in terms of legal tender and fractional reserve banking, a system like this need not rise up around bitcoin as it consists of infinitely divisible units and does not require any special legal status to be useful to people.
I would say that in the long run, the only reason any currency is useful is because of the legal structure that surrounds it. Governments collect taxes -- which law abiding citizens must pay -- and they only collect taxes in particular currencies. Courts assess damages in terms of some currency; bankruptcy courts must also use some currency to decide how to liquidate assets. These are all part of the legal structure that helps give money value, by creating demand: there are people in society who need money to satisfy legal requirements.
It has nothing to do with what sort of banking system you use or how your money is created. The point is about the demand for money, without which it would have no value (likewise with supply, but there is no question about how money is supplied). Bitcoin also has sources of demand, but these sources are much weaker than the legal system.
The reason people would hoard their money under the mattress rather than in deposit accounts is because they don't trust the banks have the money.
Sure, but that sort of activity is discouraged by inflationary trends, which cause the mattress full of money to lose value over time. You would see a lot more hoarding if deflation were the norm; it would, in fact, be advantageous to hoard money, as interest paid on a bank account would have to be negative for banks to be able to profit (in the extreme case). You seem to be arguing that Bitcoin would create a system in which there are no banks; that suggests that no loans would ever be issued (which is, after all, the primary and oldest function of banks).
I think you are suggesting that for bitcoin to be successful it would have to be the only currency used by people. I don't think we should assume this. It can fill the niche that credit/debit cards and paypal fill now.
Except that to (competitively) fill that niche, Bitcoin must:
So, the problem is not with deflationary currency per se, it is that deflationary currencies have been deemed to be incompatible with the current FRB, debt-backed, single currency system due to fear of the deflationary spiral phenomenon you describe.
The problem is, in fact, deflationary currency. Debt is part of any economy; sometimes people need loans in order to weather difficult seasons, start new businesses, etc. Debt is not some new economic phenomenon: debt was common at the time the bible was written, with biblical passages referring to loans without bothering to explain how loans work. You will never create an economy without any debt, and deflationary spirals are a problem in any system where people have to repay debts, regardless of whether the currency is backed by physical assets, cryptography, or the law.
It is hard to make a good case for deflation, simply because deflation encourages hoarding and thus robs money of its only real utility. Money is only useful when it is traded; a pile of dollar bills has little use ex
If conserving and saving for the future or only buying things you really want or need is bad for an economy then perhaps there is something wrong with the way the economy is structured.
There is a difference between saving and hoarding. When you save money, it does not just disappear from the economy; it can be used by others, and you are paid some amount of interest for what amounts to a loan. Now, this is a simplified version of the banking system -- there are tons of regulations on how your money can be used by the bank -- but at the basic level, putting money in a bank account does not harm the economy. Hoarding, on the other hand, takes money out of circulation; it is like having a pile of cash in a mattress.
Deflation encourages hoarding, and hoarding encourages deflation. It can become a disaster for an economy, basically halting spending and in the worst case causing currency to fail or be replaced (ironically making the hoarded money worth even less than it was before the crisis). These sorts of spirals are disastrous for anyone who has a loan, as it makes it very hard to find the money needed to repay the loan, which further contributes to the problem by increasing the demand for currency even further. Bitcoin adds another dimension to deflationary spirals: there is a hard limit on the amount of Bitcoin currency that can be in circulation at any given time, and so it is basically impossible to correct a deflationary spiral; it must run its course, even if that creates a catastrophic failure (note that a government correcting a deflationary spiral does not necessarily lead to inflation; the government is equally capable of taking money back out of circulation when the crisis is averted.).
So solutions exist but rely on governments to implement them
Strictly speaking, the solutions rely on banks; the government only has to stay out of the way. This, unfortunately, creates a political problem: the government needs to stay out of the way, but that means dropping a number of far-right policies that have been pushed for a few decades now. In the USA, large cash transactions are automatically reported to the DEA (note that this is not the IRS or the Treasury), which creates a big problem for digital cash deployment -- a person might reasonably make a large electronic payment using digital cash, without the convenient paper trail.
If you need escrow, chargebacks, etc then you pay extra. With bitcoin people have a choice, the guy at the gas station I use every week doesn't have the choice of waiving cc fraud protection if he believes it unnecessary for customers he knows.
The guy at the gas station has the choice of issuing loans on his own if he wants -- if he knows a person really does live around the corner and really will come back with the $10 he is short on, he can trust the person to do so. Credit cards are provided by banks as a service; that service comes with fees, just like a Bitcoin clearing house would come with fees. The difference with Bitcoin is that the guy at the gas station has no choice when it comes to being connected to the Internet; he must have an always-on, high-speed connection, and he must pay for it, whether or not he makes use of additional services.
True, but anonymity isn't the primary goal of the bitcoin project, I am not sure why it gets so much attention. The point stands that it is still better at this than what people are currently using for online purchases.
Anonymity is one of the main sources of demand for Bitcoin, that is why it receives so much attention. People want to make electronic payments without leaving a paper trail, and that is why they gravitate towards Bitcoin. It is true that Bitcoin offers better anonymity than other popular payment systems; it would be better still if we used a digital cash system that did not require people to take special steps to ensure their anonymity.
Deflation simply encourages saving
Otherwise known as "hoarding," which is extremely bad for an economy as it discourages trade. Deflation also discourages credit, which like it or not is an economic necessity.
There are many times I wish places accepted bitcoin or similar rather than a cc or paypal.
OK, but the government has absolutely no reason to accept Bitcoin payments. I understand the Bitcoin is popular among anarchists who love the idea of money without governments or large banks, but the fact is that money -- even gold coins -- gets is value from the legal structure that surrounds it. Bitcoin does not have any legal structure surrounding it; if you try to sue someone over a Bitcoin transaction, the first thing the court will do is convert all your Bitcoin values into whatever currency your government issues. At least in the USA, Bitcoin transactions would actually be considered barter for any legal purpose, and thus would be converted to dollar transactions when it comes to taxes, lawsuits, and so forth. This is why demand for Bitcoin will always be weak: people have to live with their government, and no government has a reason to use Bitcoin.
People will figure this [secure offline transactions] out if it ever becomes worthwhile.
People already figured out how to make secure offline transactions, over a decade before Bitcoin was even envisioned. Look at the work of Chaum or Okamoto, who presented digital cash systems that were secure and provided offline transactions (meaning that no network beyond the connection between the parties engaged in the transaction is required; imagine inserting a smart card into a cash register). Chaum proved that any digital cash system that offers secure offline transactions will result in tokens that grow linearly in the length of the transaction chain; this basically implies a need for a central authority that can issue fresh, unused tokens.
There were reasons that these systems were not deployed, but they had nothing to do with technology or economics -- in fact, both of those weigh strongly in favor of those systems. The problem is politics, as major world governments basically do not care about computer or even financial security, and are much more interested in being able to watch every transaction that is made. This is not a problem that Bitcoin will solve, since governments can either attack the anonymity of Bitcoin (practically guaranteed to happen if it ever becomes a blip on the radar) or simply ban it altogether -- which would make it impossible to have money exit the system, which people will need to do if they want to buy anything legally.
Escrow services, mt gox codes, reputation
All of which add costs to transactions, which necessitates even more demand for Bitcoin to compete -- which is already a problem for Bitcoin. What you are thinking of is a Bitcoin clearing house, where some service takes on the risk of a double spending attack. People do not take on risk at no cost. Reputation is not something that scales well without a service e.g. a credit rating agency, which also adds costs.
It can be if you know what you are doing. It is definitely much more anonymous than using cc's online or to order food etc.
It is, however, less anonymous than paper money, and less anonymous than Chaum-style systems. It is also a bad idea to rely on people to know what they are doing; see email encryption, trojan horse malware, etc.
Your economic "disadvantages" are pretty much opinion at this point
No, they are real and they are serious. Deflationary currencies are dangerous and run the risk of deflationary spirals, where loans are defaulted on and people stop spending their money. Deflation hurts the liquidity of currency, which undermines the currency's usefulness. Having to wait 10 minutes, having to
In the U.S. I live in, practically everyone and their grandmom is on Facebook
I also live in the US, and guess what? Neither I, nor my mother, nor my grandparents have Facebook. Neither do several of my coworkers, including several who quit the site.
Don't be so quick to assume that everyone has a Facebook account.
When a site has ~800 million active users, you can generally expect that the person you want to communicate with is using that company's services
Considering that there are an estimated 2.25 billion people who use the Internet, I would say that with 800 million users, the probability that the person you want to communicate with is actually on Facebook is a little more than 1 in 3...
The little people get to wait for the important people -- like the Olympic committee, or in the future perhaps anyone with enough money -- when the city changes its traffic patterns for them. After all, it is not really equality if the important people have to wait for red lights just like everyone else, right?
As for emergency vehicles, I live in a small city right now that manages to give them green lights without a special CCTV system. Each traffic light has a sensor that detects sirens/flashers and changes the light appropriately; it may sound surprising, but this is actually a reliable, well-engineered system.
We have big events here too -- the college football team's games draw big crowds from neighboring towns. CCTV is not needed for that either; police can simply disable traffic lights at appropriate locations and direct traffic as needed. Perhaps this is more than London could be expected to do, given how large of a city they are, but somehow I doubt it -- they have a much larger police force than we have.
Really, the benefit of the CCTV system for traffic control is overstated here. What London is really showing the world is that when important people are in their city, they can give those people priority as if they were an emergency vehicle, and they can do so discretely. People might complain if police officers started waving through businessmen and politicians, but nobody can complain about the light changing, and there is no need for rich people to attach flashers to their cars.
When I was in high school (a decade ago), I had a friend who managed to send/receive 14000 text messages in a single month. I have no idea how that is possible, but his parents took away his phone privileges after that.
Surviving, but with a smaller yacht for the CEO...
developed by a narcissist for advertisers, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies (in no particular order)
FTFY
...apparently I am behind the times on these things.