As long as you believe in fairy tale technology like microstamping, why not just require every crime lab have a CSI-type "enhancing" microscope? That way you could code a GUI in Visual Basic and then have the computer tell you who committed the crime.

For those who are uninformed, read about how cartridge microstamping (doesn't) work in practice, and even if it *did* work, think about how trivial it is to defeat. The microstamping system is supposed to use a rather weak force to stamp a tiny serial number? Nope, I can't see how that could ever be trivially defeated, even if it *did* work in the first place.

So, you mean to say that the negative reciprocal of the risk of nonextinction is rapidly diminishing?

You worded that confusingly. Did you mean to say, "the risk we won't not be extinct is not diminishing?"

If that's true, then "WTF, Pirate Party?"

Don't be autistic. Yes, technically the value of these hyperinflating currencies is infinitesimally above zero. That does not count as "keeping value" when practically speaking it takes wheelbarrows full of currency notes to buy a loaf of bread.

So, no, you're wrong. History has repeatedly shown that simply having a government insist on taxation in the form of a currency they issue is an insufficient backstop for value in the face of loss of confidence in the populace.

People aren't stupid: they exit the currency in favor of other, more stable stores of value (other currencies, land, tampons, whatever), get paid in kind, or simply resort to barter. They convert into the worthless government currency later to pay taxes. They don't ride the sinking ship.

You posed the question incorrectly.

What we're saying is that US laws mandating the value of the USD are only worth as much as people believe. There were laws mandating the value of the Mark in the Weimar Republic. There are laws mandating the value of the Zimbabwean Dollar. Obviously, those laws weren't/aren't sufficient to make people trust the currency and they collapsed.

Now, asking whether people *should* find the BTC to be as trustworthy as the USD is an appropriate question. The answer to that is obviously "no".

What we take issue with is the perspective that there is some divine providence conferred on national currencies that make them trustworthy, when clearly there is no such intrinsic property like that.

So what you're saying is that the federal government refuses to abide by the Constitution. Okay, I agree that is what they do. Your argument is that we will get them to stop breaking the rules by making a rule that says that they can't break the rules?

The federal government has been wiping its ass with the Constitution ever since FDR. Trying to constrain or restrain the federal government via written law is a fool's errand.

Hm, I wouldn't. I'd auction off the hardware, then I would invest half of the proceeds in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...

...or just place a permanent freeze on your credit, like I did a decade ago. When you want to apply for credit you temporarily lift the freeze for a few days whereupon it reverts to frozen. It works much like making your Bluetooth device discoverable.

Exactly. How many of these pedants would have their mind blown when they consider that use tax is supposed to be paid based on tax jurisdiction they are in. Okay, perhaps that's not mind blowing, but now consider you bought a pizza and are eating it while driving in a car passing through various tax jurisdictions while doing so. What counts as "putting to use" in terms of eating pizza? Chewing, digesting, extracting the food energy for biological processes? If it's the last one, what happens when the pizza is vomited out in a different jurisdiction? Does one apply for a tax credit?

Uh oh, our sales/use tax system has boundary conditions! Therefore sales tax is completely inviable! Herp derp.

The odometer approach is a good, workable idea.

Parent is actually insightful. Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but the summary should have mentioned the license. I assumed this was yet another MS "open source" release under one of their shitty proprietary licenses (you know, the kind of "open source" that is so restrictive it practically comes with an NDA).

Using a Free license like MIT actually makes this more than an empty gesture. Yes, I actually confirmed the LICENSE.txt on the github project is MIT License.

I suggest the multipart (fully cited) writeup on Eating Academy. Dr. Attia is a physician with degrees in aeronautical engineering and applied math, so his style communicates well to our demographic:
http://eatingacademy.com/nutri...

The larger point is that this corroborates the main issue in this topic: that for years the "science" advocated for improper (sometimes harmful) "optimizations" for health. The ignominious list of failures is quite long.

What I have learned in biochemistry is that one should always ask for explicit evidence and never presume... the LDL line of reasoning was "so obvious" to the scientists that they never bothered testing their assumptions ("Plaques in blood vessels have cholesterol, blood has cholesterol and some of it is from food. Therefore, high cholesterol foods cause plaques! Let's ignore the fact that half of patients presenting with CHD have normal LDL-c levels. We *know* it's the LDL-c that's the risk factor!" Fail.)

"Oops, confounders."

Yes. I get the sense around here that people need to understand the concept of "confounders" in scientific studies.

Take hypercholesterolemia, for example. For years it's been thought that LDL concentrations in the blood are a risk factor and there have been multiple studies attempting to establish the relationship. The confounder? LDL isn't just floating sludge... it's "packetized". These "packets"/particles can come in varying particle sizes. They didn't think of that when doing the initial studies (over a period of decades!). Evidence now seems to show that it's the LDL particle concentration that has the dose-response relationship to CHD while the LDL concentration measurement that everyone uses today is a confounded proxy measurement that does *not* correlate to risk.

Similarly, HDL being beneficial is essentially debunked now. It's suspected that it is confounded by other factors. Some of the most telling evidence is that drugs designed to increase HDL failed clinical trials due to *increased* mortality.

God damn Slashdot.

See? Here we have a poster who claimed superior performance using a belt-onion—as everyone who knows anything would expect—but failed to give us an explanation of our upgrade options!

Who are the major players in the allicin-rich pants suspension market segment? Have you tried garlic suspenders? Any recent startups coming out of stealth mode with something like leek garters? What's disruptive here?!

Also, that post is worthless without at least an unboxing video.

Heh. You, sir, are a good sport.

In the larger context of the Constitution, most of these debates miss the fact that the Constitution is explicitly constructed as a whitelist of powers for the government. Everything else is reserved for the states and people. As for those Founders who opposed the Bill of Rights on the principle that it might mislead people into thinking the Constitution enshrines and delimits the people's rights... well, it seems they were correct after all.

The fact that the federal government has used a few privilege exploits ("general welfare" and commerce clause) to redefine the document does not change the fact that—the concept of civil rights not withstanding—the federal government simply does not have this power whitelisted.