That's a curious theory, on par with Slashdot Beta.

What's interesting about BTC is you don't "own" coins.

You need to define what you think ownership is, and then compare it to ownership of other items that we commonly call money.

The public ID is recorded as having "coins" assigned to it; much like if you have a username on a World of Warcraft server, the server has a database record that says your username holds a certain number of warcraft gold tokens.

Well, I don't own the servers at my bank. There is nothing in this Universe, other than virtual association of some monetary units with the number of my bank account, that says that I have money on my account. But you wouldn't say that I don't own the money that my bank holds for me, would you?

Some more strict debaters may say that no, I don't own that money; it's just the bank has a debt to me, payable on demand. But from every practical point of view (that excludes high-flying economists) I do own that money. What is the test for ownership? I guess it's quite simple. If I may have access to it at any time, and if I can spend it in any way I want. I guess the money at the bank satisfies that test. BTC in your wallet is also technically owned by you because you are free to spend them on anything you want, or to destroy (by deleting the wallet.) There is no authority other than you who can do it (aside from the 50% attack.) If you ask any IRS agent, any lawyer, any judge they will tell you that you own a thing if you exercise full control over it. The duck test, if you wish.

I cannot say what laws govern in-game toy money, but most likely they are just game items that you collect during the game. As long as they are not declared money, or other goods in real world, they are just part of the game; you cannot call the police if a demon of 34th rank jumps you and robs you of all your gold.

BTC is declared to be money, for better or for worse. This means that it is now regulated as money. You'd better declare BTC that you hold in foreign accounts, and pay tax on all your BTC income. Welcome to the club of big boys, BTC. And, by the way, the big boys don't like you at all, and the system is biased against you. Such is life.

I'm not sure what is worse, Altium or Slashdot Beta ... I think they deserve each other :-)

It became very clear why digital circuit designers abandoned graphics and switched text for complex designs.

HDL compilers also do a better job at optimization and detection of problems. A schematic on a sheet of paper will not tell you that some of your inputs may be driven by HiZ outputs, or that two connected HiZ-capable outputs will be active at the same time. A simulation of your code will find that.

Simulink is not as easy as it looks. Not every block has compatible I/O, and not every arrow from block A can connect to block B. You have to understand what data those blocks are producing and consuming. Simulink is a useful tool ... but only for a specific class of problems. I am not sure if it can be even used to calculate primes. A simple airline ticket reservation system would require sheets and sheets of Simulink graphic.

Text-based code is very powerful. A mathematician can write a formula with just a few symbols ... but each of those symbols requires a university course to understand.

How are circuits designed today if they are not drawn?

They are synthesized by XST, Synplify Pro, or a similar tool.

Slashcott Feb. 10-17!

That's OK. We are both guessing.

I find the notion that somewhere near 10% of all cops are waiting in the wings with bags of drugs and spare guns waiting to plant them on people, and the idea that LEO's perjuring themselves is "routine" to be almost tinfoil-hat worthy.

It's simply Pascal's Wager.

It's not fashionable to say here, but Io think the overwhelming majority of police are honest, hard-working people looking to serve the public interest.

I have met very few police officers in my life, and they all appear to be good people. However this is not relevant. You cannot predict what kind of an LEO will stop you on the freeway for $something. You can only estimate your chances. Many things may go wrong. The LEOs may have heard a broadcast about a dangerous criminal, who looks like you, who is driving a car, just like yours. This will make the encounter very tense. You may overreact... and it goes downhill pretty fast. As I said, only one of the officers at the scene may have a bag, but he can throw it into your car just in case, without telling anyone else. This will create a good, solid reason for holding you for a while... and then they may release you, and you will be happy like a clam. You likely know the probability theory, so go ahead and calculate the numbers. What is the chance that you get a bag planted if there are 10 officers at the scene, and each has a p=0.1 of planting it? P=(1-0.9^10), or 0.65 !!!

Here is my view on it. I am not a CPA, so do not take this to IRS.

Goods cannot be taxed before they are sold. Your rocks with silver are safe. You may have them registered as inventory, or as raw product, or anything in between, but until your business sells them for MONEY you do not owe tax.

That would be the same case with BTC. However recently the US Government acknowledged that BTC is MONEY. This means that once you receive a Bitcoin in your possession, you may owe tax on the profits (if there are any) from the transaction. A BTC is not a potential money anymore, it is money now.

This means that when the USA acknowledged that BTC is money it was a setup intended to bury BTC in regulations and taxation (that is nearly impossible to do.)

Yep. I'm so stupid to increase my money by 4X in less than a year...

You can always trade stocks and foreign currencies. BTC is just one kind of foreign currency. However this trading is just speculation; you do not produce anything new in the process, you do not enrich the planet with results of your labor. All that you do is you transfer money from pockets of less lucky (or less wise) people into your pockets (assuming that you are more lucky or more wise.)

Humanity would thank you far more if you instead use the time to review the existing SlashCode and figure out how it can be served from thousands of mini-servers that Slashdot readers run on their fast connections (fiber, cable etc. are quite common in cities.) BitTorrent could be a starting point for that. One way to do that is to simply mirror the database. The new articles and comments are not posted all that often - maybe one every 10 seconds, and they are small in size. The catch is in ensuring integrity of the content. One way to do that is by signing all comments and posts, and checking for the signature in the browser... using JS. That would be probably one of few, rare as hen's teeth, useful applications of JS.

The edit window should be configurable in Preferences. Once you click "Submit" the comment is posted ... but only for you. You can see it in the context, reread it, change if necessary... (editing restarts the timer.) Once the timer expires, the comment is posted for everyone.

This would be a function that is available ony to logged in users, since it's much easier to follow the identity with a cookie. AC comments are published instantly, and they cannot edit them (because they cannot be easily linked to their comments.)

This would be a great example of an improvement that can be done within the Classic UI.

Maybe 10% ? There is no way to find out. Even 10% is too many if the encounter means your conviction. Some departments are 100% honest; other are 100% corrupted. LEOs are routinely lying in court; from that it's one small step to planting evidence.

It doesn't always mean that they are rotten to the core. They simply may want to have an insurance against an error in judgement. (For example, after a chase a cop shoots a drug dealer; then he discovers that the dealer was unarmed. Well, not anymore...) Even a theoretically honest cop may want to carry something that will save his $behind if the circumstances turn ugly. A cop who is already power-mad will be happily carrying a wide selection of evidence. And once that bag, or that gun, is available among one of the dozen cops... it will end up near your body, or in your car. Those items are freebies among the police.

I will gladly grant you that I do not expect an honest, law-abiding cop to carry or plant evidence. From that I can turn this table and ask you: what percentage of cops YOU think are crystal clear honest?

I look forward to the day when the police confiscate my phone so I can get back 40k or so

I hope this will be enough to cover new front teeth, and the discomfort that you will experience when a JBT kicks them out for you. The city may pay you $40K later, if you are lucky. However the "officer" on steroids will not be punished; he will be free to continue his "activities."

The dental chair is not the worst that can happen to you. Police can charge you with any number of imaginary violations, such as "obstructing the officer" or "disturbing the peace." Many of them carry bags with drugs and "spare" drop guns. If need arises, those items will be "found" on you.

If you cannot defend yourself against those charges you will become a criminal, and then your life in the USA, as you know it, will be pretty much over. The police have too much power today. Your absolute best plan of action is to never, ever deal with a police officer in your life. Many of them are good people; but you cannot take the risk.

With regard to Beta, I will be avoiding /. for the next week.

When the other 90% of websites out there turn off JS then I guess that argument will hold up

At least 90% of the Web sites that I visit do not require JS, and are perfectly usable without it. The few that insist on JS are never revisited. There are many Web sites out there, and so little time.

Would everybody have preferred them to write it using asp.net?

They are free to internally use whatever they want, as long as they send standard HTML to the browser. I do not want to permit random Web sites to run random scripts on my computer. It may be in a sandbox, but even the permitted actions may be undesirable. A small piece of JS code can run DDoS, for example, without you knowing it.

I'm not seeing anything bad coming from the Beta site.

Malicious code is often distributed through ad servers.

Well I haven't seen any security warnings or people beating down the door claiming that there PII was stolen from Slashdot, but I'll keep my eyes open.

That's a good plan. Besides, you have other things to lose than just the PII. It's a good thing that JS sandbox cannot be breached, ever, and that the code of all browsers is going through mathematical proof of correctness before release. It also helps that Firefox's code is secret, and nobody can look for bugs in it.

You don't have to lock the front door of your house. Most likely your neighbors won't be entering. However most of us still lock our doors - just because it's a good idea. I want my computer locked. Most of the JS out there is trying to sell me things and to sell me to others. JS rarely has a value to me. HTML alone is functional enough. I can understand that if you are building a complex piece of software in browser (like Gmail or Google Docs) then you need JS. But most web sites are not that advanced; nor should they be, because it requires a lot of trust. I do not trust any Web site simply because there is no reason for me to do so. With nothing to gain and something to lose, the ratio of those two numbers gets very simple to calculate.

Some of us are here for the /., not your petulant whinnying.

Sorry, Sir, but this is a shared Web site. The cause that those "petulant whining (not whinnying, actually, unless you are into ponies :-)" comments pursue is honorable enough to temporarily hurt your enjoyment of the site.

This situation is comparable with a war against powerful alien invaders. Soldiers of your country's army are shooting at the enemy and get killed by a thousand in return, but you, a farmer, are upset that defenders' dead bodies are all over your garden.

What's amazing to me is that there's soooooo much animosity towards the changes in the new website

Just about as much animosity as you'd have toward an idea to hack your leg off because marketroids at some faraway corporation think they get a few dollars off of your misery.

It may not be the prettiest thing on the block but can somebody point out some functional deficiencies?

It does not work without JavaScript. Most people here know well why JS should be disabled.

It's not like this is the Healthcare.gov site is it?

It's getting there, though, and pretty fast.