On point (2) -- In four years of being a math major, I don't think a single professor ever used brackets in that situation, only additional parentheses.
I'm inclined to agree that it's use would be uncommon, I've not encountered it in 30 odd years of reading papers and talking math (or rather I don't recall noticing it's use).
What I must point out is you make a weak case based on myopia- for example; in 15 years of working with tens of thousands of hours of high resolution radiometrics I've never once met and talked to a dendrochronologist who's looked at the radiometric signature of individual bands of Japanese pine trees.
Sorry, they stole your money. This is a big advantage of theirs, they aren't regulated like a bank so they have no trouble taking money from marginalized people.
Why does someone always write this? PayPal is regulated to exactly the same degree a merchant account from a bank is. Their contracts are essentially identical, mirroring PayPal's own agreements with the banks that underwrite their accounts (Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase). Banks suspend merchant accounts and freeze their money for the same reasons and for the same periods of time, and no regulation stops them from doing so. In many countries, PayPal is considered a bank. In the US, it is licensed and regulated as a money transmitter in all 50 states.
I do, since it happened to me 9 years ago when I was as naive about the industry as you. First National Bank of Omaha, the largest privately held bank with $17bn in assets, if you're curious. The several thousand dollars of customer payments they had not yet disbursed was held for exactly 180 days before they released it to me.
Do you not recall because you haven't read your own agreement, or because you haven't actually opened a merchant account with a bank before? You don't have to take my word. Type ["merchant account agreement" 180] into Google to see some 40,000 examples of bank contracts with that same hold period written into them.
I've worked in a bank, and we did freeze accounts on money laundering suspicions - it's not even a choice, the law requires to do so in certain conditions.
And the OP case description is quite unclear, but the details sound like that it might be not "assets frozen while check if business is legit", but actually a threat of "charges filed against owner for circumventing anti-money laundering laws and assets confiscated".
The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.
nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off
We have the technology, we can do both!
The page is drowning in useless javascript gimmickry anyway, it should be possible to add some actually useful javascript to seamlessly switch between linear, conversation and tree view. You know, to aid the user in his interaction with the content rather than fancy stylesheets and sliding widgets.
The more I look at discourse the more it infuriates me.
The complete disregard of time tested interfaces (Usenet and the authors own StackOverflow) just doesn't jive at all with their wild claims to "reinvent online discourse". Unless their idea of reinvention translates to repeating every mistake made in the past 30 years...
What they did is unleash a terrible forum software that will undoubtedly be forced down the throat of a great many users for no reason other than it being "the next hip SV thing".
> The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off
False.
In the early days, browser designers took care to use different link colors for visited/unvisited links (gasp!). Nowdays, in the age of fancy JS gimmicks and contrast-less design, we are overriding this functionality because it apparently looks better (if you don't see the extra information).
Forums with diffent link colors for visited/unvisited posts and threading work pretty well. It's not to hard to implement something like this with JS (unless one wants all posts to be open/visible as default).
You can only show new comments, highlight them, even view them in flat mode. Threaded forum naturally separates subtopics while flat forum is just a big mess. Also old subthreads naturally die so the new stuff is usually in the new nodes. And you can also just view subtrees to follow certain discussion.
I have a question about bitcoin -- let's assume that it actually starts becoming popular. What stops any country that's adopting it from simply forking their own version? Specifically, why is everyone investing in this particular instance of bitcoin?
People have mentioned perceived value; i.e. a fork of bitcoin would only be worth something if people generally agreed it was. However, there's also another reason, and that is that the security of bitcoin is directly related to how many people are using it. In order to double-spend, you need 50% of the CPU of the system, so the more CPU power you have on the network, the more secure you are from double-spending.
Nothing stops them from doing that. It's already been done a few times, in fact.
What generally prevents tons of fracturing is the same thing that always has for currencies with no backing- perceived value of the currency. Your bitcoins are only worth what other people think they are worth.
"What generally prevents tons of fracturing is the same thing that always has- perceived value of the currency."
Except that "perceived value" is not what prevents fiat currencies from fracturing. A government could, at any time, issue a new currency that competes with or replaces its old one. The reason governments almost never do this is that it amounts to defaulting on a loan, at a fundamental level.
To put it another way, if a government decides to issue some new, incompatible currency, and whatever currency you had previously lost some or all of its value, would you trust that the new currency would not also be replaced by yet another currency later on?
Money does not just magically get its value; the "perception" that money has value is, like the perception that anything else has value, based on supply and demand. We are all familiar with the money supply; money demand is generally driven by the legal structure that surrounds that money. Money demand comes from things like tax codes, debt/bankruptcy laws, torts (which often deal in monetary terms when speaking of damages), civil fines, etc. Another way to look at it is that laws allow you to use money to cancel debts of some kind, and thus the demand for money can be traced to the need people have to cancel various debts (and thus people with no debt can trade money for the goods or services of people who must cancel some debt).
Bitcoin is unique in having no legal structure surrounding it, and its demand comes principally from technical features (primarily one feature, which is secure online payments). Unsurprisingly, this demand does little to help Bitcoin survive on its own, hence the overwhelming important of Bitcoin exchanges (were these to vanish, Bitcoin would die overnight; on the other hand, the Ruble had some value in Russia even during the period of time when it lacked easy convertibility with other currencies).
To put it another way, if a government decides to issue some new, incompatible currency, and whatever currency you had previously lost some or all of its value, would you trust that the new currency would not also be replaced by yet another currency later on?
And that's not just a hypothetical, as it's precisely what happened with the Myanma (Burmese) kyat:
Perhaps the initial demand for something like USD was due to legal effects like tax codes and bankruptcy laws, but I would think the primary demand today is network-effects. If I want to participate in a transaction within the US borders, almost any transaction, I must use USD. Therefore I need USD. Most of my transactions have nothing to do with said legal structures.
I think it's hard to say that Bitcoin's demand principally comes from technical features (without proof). Certainly there are those that want secure online payments and so buy BTC but there are others that buy BTC because they think it will be more valuable in the future (relative to USD) if it gains more traction. Additional demand: low transaction costs for international exchange (I remember reading an article about Iranian nationals using BTC to sidestep export/import restrictions).
But I definitely share the frustration of explaining perceived value. From an economics stand-point, "perceived value" is redundant. Value is by definition an abstract concept that humans (or other creatures) attach to something based on how much they desire it.
"Perhaps the initial demand for something like USD was due to legal effects like tax codes and bankruptcy laws, but I would think the primary demand today is network-effects"
Those network effects start somewhere, in the present; otherwise, it would be hard to explain why US dollars are hard to spend in Canada, Europe, and other countries. The answer is that in Canada, the Canadian dollar can legally cancel debts; in Europe, Euros and the remaining national currencies do it; other countries have their own currencies, or adopt the currencies of more powerful nations like the United States.
Laws about money remain the driving force of the demand for money. Failure to pay taxes is a serious crime; the US government only accepts US dollars for tax purposes. Failure to repay a private loan can result in your property being given to the lender -- and you could be arrested for trying to keep that property (formerly yours). These are legal matters that affect our daily lives, even if we do not actively think about them, and the demand for US dollars in the US, Canadian dollars in Canada, and Euros in Europe follows. If you want to be a law-abiding citizen or business in the US, you must get your hands on enough US money to at least pay your taxes; even if you participate in a barter exchange, the law requires you to pay taxes on that trade. Even if your plan is to live off the land, you will still have to pay Uncle Sam at some point: hunting and trapping fees, fishing fees, fees for felling trees, etc. Other countries have similar fees and taxes, except that the requirements are for a different currency. Network effects are secondary: People know there is demand for US dollars in the US and in a few other countries, and so they may deal in US dollars even if they have no debts in US, much like a shopkeeper will buy and sell goods he may not have personal use for.
"I think it's hard to say that Bitcoin's demand principally comes from technical features (without proof)."
Can you point to any other sources of demand? There are no laws about Bitcoin; if you issue a Bitcoin loan to me and I fail to repay it, what are you going to do? Even if you took me to court, the first thing the judge would do is to convert whatever Bitcoin amount you name to the currency of your country. No country will accept Bitcoin for tax purposes. Those reasons alone are enough to conclude that without Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin would probably not survive at all -- merchants will only accept Bitcoin because they are aware of a way to trade Bitcoin for their country's currency (and the lack of stability in the exchange rate really puts a damper on that). Even people who use Bitcoin for black market transactions rely on the existence of Bitcoin exchanges.
There is no denying that there is demand for Bitcoin's technical features. People want a way to make secure, peer-to-peer online payments, and they are not satisfied with solutions that rely on trusted third parties. It seems that all other demand for Bitcoin stems from this; speculators are basing their Bitcoin investments on the belief that there is some real demand for Bitcoin and that the Bitcoin market will grow, but were there no demand for Bitcoin those speculators would not be in business (speculation does not create a market). The low transactions fees for international exchange are a product of lacking third parties, and I would classify that as a technical feature of any digital cash system.
I'm interested in your third paragraph, particularly "Money demand comes from things like tax codes, debt/bankruptcy laws, torts, ...civil fines, etc."
In prison, packs of cigarettes are money and none of the things you mentioned exist. Yet in a prison I can trade a pack of smokes for a tattoo, drugs, cellphones, etc. It seems like money arises out of the need to have a reliable, constant value for exchanging good and services.
Do you differentiate between money and currency(medium of exchange)?
Prison has a lot of structure, in the form of laws,customs,and constraints imposed from without and from within. The role of money in expressing the power of the state may be distinguishable from its role as a medium of trade, but I think if anything the prison example contradicts the point you seemed to be making.
Fair point, I meant it in that prison officials don't issue the currency and in fact they actively discourage trade among prisoners. betterunix makes it seems like the state and money are essential for each others existence.
I'm not sure if there is a difference between currency and money, but there is a difference between fiat and non-fiat currencies. Cigarettes are not a fiat currency; they have inherent demand because they can be smoked.
"What stops any country that's adopting it from simply forking their own version?"
Nothing. Anyone could start their own bitcoin2. But new instances of a digital currency cannot debase other instances. So that isn't a viable way for a government to capture bitcoin, or to debase the value of the original bitcoin.
In fact, were I running a banana republic with a worthless currency, I'd be tempted to try using a new "bitcoin-space" as a currency with strong protections against being debased. But that has plusses and minuses if you are a government.
The reasons people are using this particular instance of bitcoin is that it was launched successfully enough for people to have sufficient confidence. The mining mechanism is one key element.
Why would any country want to adopt Bitcoin? What incentive does any country have to do such a thing?
A country would be more likely to introduce a Chaum-style digital cash system, where the government would act as an issuing authority for digital cash tokens.
Relevant: The Royal Canadian Mint recently invented MintChip, a fully digital crypto-currency where private keys are stored in integrated circuit chips in micro sd cards (for smartphones/tablets) and USB dongles (for computers).
They say it is able to be exchanged online AND offline fully anonymously. The details on that are yet to be released.
This makes Canada the first country in the world to explore a fully electronic currency.
Perhaps, but it would have to be adopted side-by-side with a currency that can be used (securely) for offline transactions. Why do that, when you could just adopt one currency that can be used both offline and online (especially since you can deploy a digital cash protocol for any currency, and thus you only really need one that is useful for offline payments)?
I expect we'll eventually see a new bitcoin instance for items and gold in an MMORPG. Actually it seems to me that bitcoin could govern more than that: basically any random event ("you made a wooden shield") could go into the blockchain.
The portion of funds of funds that come from the federal government is smaller than you think, and conservatives are constantly posturing to take even that away. (Recall the Big Bird meme that came out of the presidential debates?). The lions share of federal funds go to keeping stations broadcasting, not towards content creation.
It's unlikely that any given piece of content was wholly funded by the public.
Not trying to troll I just don't understand why this is 'legitimate' and the pirate bay is not? If this was produced with my tax dollars and broadcast free on tv with no commercials why isn't it perfectly acceptable for me to download this via a torrent?
Yeah only the first 15 minutes are on their website. No idea why people who own a tv who can watch the whole thing and people who only own a computer only get 15 minutes.
If it's like most other PBS shows, tomorrow it will be available in its entirety. They want you to watch it on your television if possible, then give you the opportunity to see it online after it's aired. It may only be available online for a limited time though, so don't procrastinate too long.
If the GP is advocating that ideas and their expressions shouldn't be 'private' if expressed publicly, then comparing it to stealing is incorrect.
> Just because it's possible to steal something, you/society should allow it to happen?
A closer comparison would be: you heard me tell a story. You don't think society should allow you to tell it to someone else because I 'own' it, and to tell someone else is to 'steal' from me.
What if I don't want to be "flattered"? I don't really see anything flattering about someone copying one of my ideas when I don't want them to copy it.
You seem to be using a different definition to the word "flattery" than any I know. Being copied is inherently flattering whether you want them to copy you or not.
Flattery is a two-way act to me, why else did you use the word? You basically said "accept that someone copied you against your wishes and just ignore it".
I can see your point generally, but in this case, I can't see how being copied is anything other than flattering. It means the idea was good.
Regards your second sentence, that is what I'm saying. A large company that's put lots of resources into something fighting of another company who "stolen" their idea, while tedious, makes some sense. For an individual, I can't see how it's worth the time, stress or money to worry about copyright.
So what is the ideal scenario, in the author's mind, for how creative work should be compensated? Let's say I wrote a book, and I want to get compensated for the time I spent writing the book. In his ideal world, I would ____________ ?
My impression from the article is I would sell one copy to one person, that person, or future recipients of a copy, would copy it for every single other person that might want to read it, and then I would just wait and pray for donations. Am I misinterpreting his article?
Prior to creating the work, the author solicits "sponsors" (or backers, in the kickstarter terminology). Each sponsor would recieve equal rights as the author. How much each sponsor pays is up to the negotiations between the author and the sponsors.
When the negotiation/solicitation finishes, the author will be paid the agreed amount by the sponsors. This is the entirety of the money the author will recieve for the works, there is no royalties received from the sponsors.
The sponsors recieve the work when it is complete, or if the author doesn't finish, then the author will be sued for contractual obligations, just like how you today if you hadn't fulfilled your contract.
The sponors have full, but non-exclusive rights to the work. How they use those rights is up to them.
the incentive would be because either the sponsor thinks they can sell the work for profit (commercial motivation), or fan based motivation (they really like the artist's work, and would pay to see it).
The work isn't _given_ away after its done - the sponsors gets to choose what they want to do. If none of the sponsors give away the work, then it could become quite an exclusive/unique piece of work! Or, if one sponsor decides they'd like to share it for free on torrent, it would indeed destroy the business model of the sponsors who might be interested in selling the work commercially. But that's the risk they have to take.
That's how I interpreted it. Once you sell a single copy of something you made, there are now two equal owners of it. The new owner worked really hard to make that copy, so it's fair.
The only legitimate argument I'm seeing there is point (2), and even then, all you're saying is that in absolute dollars the music industry is generating more profit -- ignoring population growth, accessibility to more music (iTunes, Amazon music), etc. -- so it's very hard to say whether the music industry profits grew despite piracy, because of piracy, or independent of piracy. I'm sorry, but that's extremely unconvincing. Given the article in the OP and this reply, I can't really see the difference between your current viewpoint and pure selfishness/FYGM.
I think we agree on a few of those points, #4 however, worries me dearly. Did you even read it?
But even if all of this were not so, even if artists were indeed suffering (which they aren’t, but parasitic middlemen are), copyright would still need to be scaled back. It is now infringing on fundamental rights, and as a European citizen, I’m not prepared to give up those citizens’ rights for a multinational corporation to boost their profit.
In the 21st century, the Internet IS speech, IS assembly, IS association and IS the press.
If a corporation can’t sustain a business without having these rights limited, then that corporation deserves to go out of business. The sooner the better.
And in regards to this:
> so it's very hard to say whether the music industry profits grew despite piracy, because of piracy, or independent of piracy.
This has been covered countless times, piracy, has a huge, and known, positive effect on sales to music and movies.
You're right, I actually agree with #4 more than my previous post will admit. But I believe the unrestricted level of piracy the OP suggests should be allowed swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
Indeed, IP in general is something I personally disagree with whole heartedly and completely; however, sadly, I do understand the implications and realities we face which make such a stance unworkable.
It should be noted, the only reason people are suggesting such extremes is due to the other end pushing first and foremost. Life + 50 is an absurd amount of time to keep something locked up under copyright/patent and lengthening or strengthening such laws is going counter to everything else in an age where information [in general, media included] is being made increasingly available and accessible in much larger quantities year on year.
One would assume, with all other things considered, that lengthy IP laws would be undergoing contraction opposed to expansion. They only need to be long enough to foster innovation and creation, anything more and they become counter productive and detrimental to society at large.
