What can I say? For over 100 years almost every US bank issued their own bank notes. Even railroads issued their own money. This practice never made it way to the Supreme Court as a issue. Here is a interesting link.

http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...

The tax rules around currency trading are complex. Each time you convert your currency you have to calculate your gain / loss from FX rate movements and pay taxes on that. If you are a currency traded you must "mark to market" you currency positions at the end of each year and pay short term capital gains on your unrealized gains. One of the measures of being a currency trader are the number of transaction you do each year, so I could see a casual Bitcoin user falling into this category.

No, it was not put there to avoid that problem. For the first 100 years of the US most of the money issued was private. Bank notes issued by private banks. It was not until the Civil War that the Federal Government got into the money business issuing Greenbacks.

The clause in the Constitution grants the government to right to mint money. It does not precluded anybody else from doing so.

I would like to extend on this - The Justice Department does have rules around this. When stocks (Google, MSFT, etc.) are sized they are sold on a exchange that meets minimum liquidity and transparency. Liquidity should be obvious - you don't want to crush the market by dumping a big block all at once. Transparency because you don't want a inside cartel depressing prices.

"Sold by and shipped by Amazon.com" means that Amazon is the retailer, has purchased the inventory, and they bear the risk and cost of holding that inventory.

Third party sells have 2 options. They can list on Amazon and ship from their warehouse. The other option is that they can rent warehouse space from Amazon. Amazon will then ship the goods for them. The 3rd party has to stock the warehouse and bears the risk and cost of inventory.

Laws have to factor in both actions and intent. If one relied on only one or the other abuses could occur. I suspect that you are having issues with the nebulas nature of intent.

Most fraud and white collar rely more highly on this than other crimes. Partly this is because criminals are more inventive and imaginative then legislators. Partly this is because the western legal system is designed to ban actions, not proscribe actions. i.e., if a law says you can't do something than you can do it.

I share some of your unease on overreaching laws but I think intent has to a important factor.

Here is one article that should not be behind a pay wall. : http://www.economist.com/news/...

If I have time I will try to dig up more. I don't think we are that far off from each other. I think their tech is better than "early promising research" even if it is not up to production quality.

Yes, sort off.

From what I have been reading, it looks like they rolled out their processes too quickly and promised too much. A buggy beta release of the latest FPS will cause the wroth of fan boys. But that is o.k. because the fan boys knew they were downloading a buggy beta release. Medical testing is a different ball of wax.

That being said, we know the lab has been able to do some pretty nifty things in terms of amount of work that could be done with a drop of blood. So there has to be something there.

I personally think it is a horrible idea. On the plus side I don't know of any banks that are interested in doing something like that.

If you are confused, the banks are only testing the "ledger" ability of block chains, not the "currency" aspect. The idea is that a block chain would be associated with asset (stocks, bonds, gold, whatever) and this asset could be traded directly between institutions and people without a trusted intermediary (a.k.a. the middle man). One interesting application, which boarder on science fiction, is the self-owning driverless car.

And whose fault is it that they are not comfy or pretty enough? I mean I am sure your wife, like mine, knitted her own socks from fiber that she has harvested, processed, spun, dyed? (It always surprises me how expensive DIY socks costs. I would have thought and some yarn and needles would be sufficient. But one has to have multiple spinning wheels, combs, etc. Then there are the conventions which are as weird as the science fiction conventions that I go to. The list goes on.)

It could also be a question of cultural competence. Higher income people tend to have more education so they know how the educational system works. Thus they can position their kids to do well on the tests, as was suggested by the article.

A good example of this is jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles were one of the first tests used to measure IQ. In response, middle class parents bought more jigsaw puzzles. Their kid’s IQ increased. So, does exposing children raise their IQ or does it just help in passing a test? If it is just the latter than there are issues that need to be addressed.

On a side note, the article made me chuckle a little. I went to a magnet school in Houston many years ago. Back then its criteria was explicitly racist. Houston was under a court order to integrate. All of the white rich kids went to private school leaving behind poor black kids, so there was nobody left to integrate. The magnet schools were created to lure white children into the system so some balance could be achieved.

I will disagree, and I would argue that computers should not be intruded into this classroom.

I tutor inner-city kids. Common issues are highly mobile families, poverty, English as a second language, and refuge status. They are academically behind their peers. Their parents are unsophisticated or put little emphasis on education. Throwing even modest obstacles can derail them.

I get why computers are important to education. However, this has to be a school wide initiative, not a classroom one.

Those are the partners – that is the management of Sycamore. However, that is not who owns them.

Think of Sycamore as an investment advisor of a investment company, which is kind of like a mutual fund – it is the just the scale is very different. A few outsider investors (pension funds, the ultra-rich, etc.) buy shares in the investment company. The investment company than buys companies.

Sycamore is paid on the performance of the fund. They may or may not have a direct ownership in the investment company and thus may not have any direct ownership of Hot Topic.

I think you are missing the point. They are not going to merge the two organizations. Hot Topic will remain Hot Topic, ThinkGeek will remain ThinkGeek. Both will carry their own lines – I expect some cross over but not much.

However, in one sense they are very much alike. They both market pop culture goods to a niche market. Their goods are partially based on fads so they have a short shelf life. Lots of custom stuff that you can't find in a more traditional retail shop like Amazon or Wal-Mart.

What they are going to combing is the back off stuff. Accounting and procurement are at the top of my list.

To extend, some of the best scrambled eggs I have had was from an espresso machine. The steam made the eggs very fluffy and allowed the proprietor to server breakfast under a "coffee shop" license instead of a "restaurant" license.