Actually for me bitcoin proves just how few people can ACTUALLY spot a pyramid scheme or a pump and dump - instead resorting to calling everything that seems too good to be true a scam. It may work 99.9% of the time, but BTC is the false positive IMO.
I totally agree that the Cyprus thing is totally bogus though, journalists are uninformed and lazy as usual. The real reason is that it seems more and more likely that bitcoin will be the currency of the Internet in the future. And nothing else.
The fact that Bitcoin is touted as an alternative to untrustworthy -- because inflationary -- traditional currencies, while its exchange rate staggers around like an ice-skating drunk compared to those same traditional currencies, does not fill me with confidence.
"The real reason" for the current price hike is most likely http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin
meaning we are back in a super high interest in bitcoin phase. Maybe because that is because the world just realized the "currency of the Internet" thing, or it is just a hype, fueled by a lot of misleading promotion and lies. No use to discuss it though, we all will learn in 6+ months...
That's a misunderstanding of history. USD used to be backed by silver and all bills said "in silver payable to the bearer on demand". It was only relatively recently that the practice ended.
It doesn't really invalidate his statement though. The USD is not backed by anything (whether it was in the past or not is irrelevant), and aside from the fact that it's commonly accepted, has no more intrinsic value than Bitcoin.
As long as 300 million people are required to convert a fraction of their income to USD for taxes, its value can't go to zero. Bitcoin's value is purely an article of faith so far.
I imaging that whole sites could be designed using only your proposed lawyer icon, possibly with some additional icon representing political correctness.
At least in my opinion, the ultimate goal of Free Software is to kill copyright. In a perfect world, everything would be public domain and at the utmost, we'd have a right to attribution (ie, you may demand to be named as the creator of something you made). Copyleft is, right now, just a "necessary evil" to bring us closer to that goal. In a sense, it's a form of using the enemies' weapons against them - but what we actually want is mutual decommissioning.
Open-source writ large is a dumb marketing gimmick. As far as useful code goes, the people who care and respect other hackers release the code anyways, copyright or no.
"Free software" vastly overestimates the value and talent of the average user--I don't feel any pity for the average City Of Farm Wars user if they don't get the source to IE.
Wouldnt it then shift from being a copyright enforcement issue to a contract/license enforcement issue? I.e. you agreed to share your source code if you distribute, but now you didn't, so sue city?
But if there is no copyright, there is no need to license the software, you can just copy it without agreeing to anything. That's what it means for something to be in the public domain.
Contracts are only valid if there is an exchange of value; you could reasonably argue that there is no value in being granted a right you already have.
But users might actually read the developers' explanations, in which case they would need to be true. If no 3rd-party verifies the permissions explanations before the app is released, then the only value is as a legal agreement between the developer and end-users. I would expect that to devolve into a 30-page EULA per app ... which has already happened, for many apps.
@ck2 is performing as thorough of a verification as possible without source code access. If I were a malicious app developer, however, I might program my app to wait a week before transmitting any user data.
As a developer I've often wished for this. You can stick it in the app description but it'd be nicer if it was on the permission screen. Marking permissions optional would be helpful too.
I've seen some apps in the android marketplaces that do have descriptions which attempt to explain the permissions. I've also seen apps that have a "lite" version with much fewer permissions needed.
But what I really want is the marketplaces to allow direct apk downloads because I always want to examine the file first on an emulator.
I do not think that this is a hype. It seems to me that a fully decentralized payment system would be of huge value to buyers and sellers.
Don't you agree with this?
Or do you believe that while useful, bitcoin won't be the system that prevails, or that no system like this can prevail because of government and/or special interests?
And on the issue of energy..
The sha256 generation is only to prove that you did invest time into it, and it is not a specific amount of time or energy either, but in relation to the total time spend by ALL miners during the past hours. I'm not saying that you don't know this, but it seems to be a common misconception.
If you make it illegal to accept BC as a business that will deter many websites from using it. And the best way to kill BC is to make sure it doesn't hit critical mass.
The difference between filesharing and BC is that in the former the value is in the files, but BC is only valuable if you can trade them for something you value.
In January 2007, John Carmack said that "…DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the D3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step—they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility—and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with."
I have really wondered about this objection. Why not just sell it on your website, the way that has worked for computer programs and services forever? You're in full control, can choose any way of charging that you want and so on. Is it less likely that people will find your app? Less likely that they have already registered their credit cards with paypal or amazon than with the appstore? Worse user experience? Anything else?
