You misunderstand and you distort what I said. Lets try it one last time.

(1) People who volunteer for the military are not forced to fight. They **agree**, up front, to go into harms way as needed. Going into harms way may or may not involve fighting. They further **agree**, up front, that participating in the fighting is a possibility. Furthermore, ordinary military training involves a certain amount of risk to life and limb, even in peace time.

(2) Non-military also **agree** to go into harms way up front. Ex. Police and firemen.

(3) Regular civilians have on occasion found themselves in a situation where they can help others by **voluntarily** going into harms way. Ex. Individuals who made it out of the world trade center but went back in to help.

(4) That people who **voluntarily** go into harms way for others deserve some extra respect.

As I said, volunteering to go into harms way is not exclusively done by those in the military. The founding fathers would be another example of doing so. By signing the Declaration of Independence they publicly declared themselves traitors to the king and put their lives on the line.

That said, having the military subservient to the elected civilian leadership and respecting the special contributions and sacrifice that members of the military make are two very different things. They are very compatible with one another.

And the publisher probably did not have to deal with the normal shipping. Gov't trucks probably showed up and the printing facility and took custody of the books.

Basically because the 99% can very suddenly find themselves a part of the 1%.

Don't be so quick to judge someone by their occupational specialty. Let me explain it to you the way a WW2 paratrooper explained it to me when I was a kid: "Don't trust the TV commercials that the military is a good place to learn a trade, like electronics, its not that simple. Every person entering the military spends some time crawling around in the mud with a rifle learning to fight. Its not some hazing ritual. When the shit hits the fan and things get desperate the cooks, clerks and mechanics are told to pick up a weapon and fight. Regardless of what job you are expecting to have in the military, don't sign up unless you are willing to pick up that weapon and fight."

This former paratrooper then told me about the truck driver he shared a frozen hole in the ground with while on the front line defending Bastogne. The truck driver was part of group that made a dangerous last minute supply run into the city before it was completely surrounded, after delivering the supplies they were told to pick up rifles and reinforce some paratroopers that were spread out very thinly. The paratrooper's brother was a clerk in the Navy. He was assigned to a destroyer in the Pacific. When the ship went to general quarter, getting ready to fight, he put away the typewriter and ledger books and manned a 40mm bofors cannon. That high school teacher I mentioned earlier, the Marine on Guadalcanal, he was wounded but instead of being medically discharged he was assigned to various army company headquarters units in Europe as a translator. While preparing his discharge paperwork someone noticed that he spoke fluent German, his fate changed. Another high school teacher was a Marine in Vietnam. He was an electronics tech with a desk job on base. Then one day he was told he would be accompanying a force recon team into enemy territory to set up sensors on a jungle road to detect enemy supply convoys. These jungle roads were under a heavy tree canopy so aerial observation was not possible.

Don't be so quick to judge clerks, truck drivers, electronics techs, etc.

Not all contributions / sacrifice are equivalent. There *is* something different about putting one's own life on the line. And the reason military service is considered in such high regard today is that for many years of very recent history putting on the uniform included a high probability of a combat deployment.

That said, even in a time of peace there is some risk. Military personnel die in training. Plus there is the ever present chance that a war will occur. One of my high school teachers joined the Marines during peacetime and a couple of years later found himself fighting on Guadalcanal, short on ammo, short on food, short on support from the Navy, and ordered to hold his position at all costs.

Many people find themselves in terrible dangerous situations and rise to the occasion, but soldiers, police, fireman, etc volunteer for such risks knowingly. Volunteering to go into harms way is a little different from accidentally finding ones self in harms way. Are these people exclusively in uniform, no, for example there were civilians that safely made it out of the world trade center but went back in to help others. That is another example of volunteering to go into harms way.

The GP's point stands. That first digital copy does seem like fair use and a hypothetical second copy does not change this.

Besides, note in the summary "can only be accessed on dedicated terminals in the library itself". The app dedicated to accessing the database and displaying the book can simply not implement copy/paste. You won't be connecting your laptop to the library network and accessing the database.

That said, its likely the digitized text will get out somehow.

Of course, that was my point a couple posts up. :-) One needs to know the basis and the value at the time of trade. I was only objecting to the notion that the customer is selling the coins and using fiat currency. It seems more of a barter and of course one needs to know the value of the object being bartered for tax purposes.

I wanted to point out that the sale takes place at the exchange to emphasize the conveniences and lack of risk in such systems. The merchant prices and does all their accounting in fiat, just as they always have. They merely transmit a fiat amount to the exchange. The exchange does the conversion and transmits back to the merchant an equivalent bitcoin amount and a bitcoin payment address. This address is the merchants. The exchange receives the coins and credits the merchant's account with the exact fiat amount originally specified. There is no risk to the merchant of price fluctuations.

Its the simplicity and lack of risk in such systems that makes bitcoin acceptance more and more common.

What this is about is Bitcoin replacing PayPal, at least as a transaction processor, a transfer mechanism. As it is PayPal is basically doomed.

What PayPal is doing is trying to switch to a new business model. Become a bitcoin exchange converting USD/EUR/etc to and from Bitcoin, and also become an online Bitcoin wallet. However as an exchange or online wallet PayPal will be one of many. They won't be the 800-lb gorilla they once were.

Not necessarily. If they are aged enough to be long term one may want to hold on to them. Spending long term assets may be something that you want to occur as an exceptional case, a manual selection, not a default automatic policy. Timing the loss is sometimes a strategic decision.

Plus if they are approaching an age where they will convert from short to long term assets one may want to hold on to them.

Again, possibly best to be a manual selection not an automatic default. For example it would be regrettable to see a long term gain offset a short term loss. Better to use a short term gain to offset a short term loss.

There are no one-size-fits-all rules as to when to spend a particular asset. There are always external and strategic circumstances to consider.

Its not really that simple either. For example LIFO (last in first out) has the advantage that it helps accumulate long term gains. So applying LIFO within the current short term gains helps a particular coin age and move from the short term to long term. Also one might want to be selective about when long term gains are spent. Again, LIFO is useful in this respect in that it prefers to spend short term.

In short LIFO may be a good default policy, maximizing and preserving the long term gains. A policy that can be overridden on that special day when one wants to cash in the long term gains.

In common scenarios the merchant uses a bitcoin exchange as an intermediary, as a payment processor. The customer never sees or touches a fiat currency (dollars, euros, etc), they only see bitcoins. The merchant never sees or touches a bitcoin, they only see fiat currency. Its only the exchange, a third party, that sells the bitcoins for fiat. The exchange accepts bitcoins from the customer and sends fiat to the merchant.

Software could automatically apply a LIFO or FIFO scheme to the coins and calculate their basis when coins are spent or sold. See http://yro.slashdot.org/commen....

If I understand things correctly, the tricky part is that you realize a taxable gain when you spend your bitcoins. Not merely when you sell them. Buy a coffee, remember to calculate and report your gain.

A recent IRS advisory said virtual currency is to be treated as an assent not a currency. So lets say you receive some bitcoins. At some future date you spend these bitcoins. Since these bitcoins are an asset you have to account for their gain or loss in value for the days you held them an declare a loss or gain on your taxes. In short spending bitcoins has the paperwork overhead of selling stocks, its not like spending dollars at all.

Ex. You buy one coin at $500 and another at $600. Coins are priced at $800 at the time of a future purchase. You buy something for $1,200, 1.5 coins. Using FIFO (first in first out) your basis for the outgoing 1.5 coins is $500 + $300 = $800, and the basis for the returning 0.5 coins is still $300. You experienced a gain of $400 on the 1.5 coins at the time of the sale and that $400 would seem to be taxable income.

Using LIFO (last in first out) your basis for the 1.5 outgoing is $600 + $250 = $850. You experienced a gain of $350.

Apologies if I botched the math, hopefully the point gets across.

A possible advantage of LIFO is that you are spending "newer" coins first. Letting your "older" coins continue to age. If you hold these "older" coins for a year or more then they may have an advantage of being taxed at a lower rate when spent or sold.

And of course you can use any scheme to determine which coins are being used in a transaction, you are not limited to LIFO/FIFO. They are just convenient examples.

My understanding is that LLVM is skipping various "legacy" platforms. 16-bit x86 came to mind but when I googled it I found that Intel is actually working on 16-bit x86 support. Some boot loaders and emulators apparently use 16-bit code.

I was going to make a snarky Z80 comment but when reading the 16-bit Intel thread I found another potential snarker discovered that a Z80 backend for LLVM exists.

Where the LLVM devs may have no interest it seems the legacy communities or other parties may step in.

While there is no technical reason not to use LLVM I expect it won't be very popular with the GNU Hurd users.