pick up a bunch of Surface tablets, and put Linux or Android on them

If you have billions in capital, it is extremely hard to move around billions in assets without all the small traders taking notice, and piling on before you can reach your full position. That's why large traders like Buffet absolutely hate day traders, and has never split his stock, causing shares in his company to be valued at over $65000 per share last I checked. Being able to trade freely and quickly is one of the few great equalizers in large capital markets.

I think the problem is that people find themselves going to the licensing zoo, because they need to find a way to undo a lot of the damage caused by the very nature of copyright and patents (and the DMCA, etc ...). A better solution is just to get rid of copyright and patents (at least on things like media and software)

... that way I can hire somebody from India to clean my house, mow the yard, do dishes, and laundry remotely over the internet. At an estimated 70K for this one, I don't think that's going to work out for me anytime soon.

... but does anybody else think the whole world should just move to 24 hr GMT, and get it over with.

... but once you get in, you can take any ride you want.

>So instead of the load being distributed properly, you want the government to shift most of the load to your back?

that argument is no logically different than saying, "well if that nigger escapes from the plantation, the master will make us other niggers work harder"

It's just plain stupid.

Bits in your bank account cannot.

Use the bits as a one-time pad.
Rearrange them to build software.
If there's patterns, treat them as a black and white light interference pattern and see what kind of images show up.
Pipe them to /dev/dsp and take a nap surrounded by pink noise, or maybe even turn them into music (they did it with radioactive decay).

C'mon, be a bit more creative.

Gold has some innate value in the sense that it can be used directly to build stuff.

Yes, and paper money can be used to do origami, and pennies can be used as floor tiles. It just happens that we currently value gold-based jewelry and electronics more than origami, but I don't assume this will necessarily always be the case.

Anything can be used for something if you're creative enough.

"I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause"

HAHHHA HAHHA HH AHA HA HAH AH HAH A HA HAH A HH A HAHA

Yeah, uh huh.

2^31 = 2,147,483,648 = $21,474,836.48 when counted in pennies. I once worked for a software company where a call came into the support desk from one of our customers accounting departments. Once their sales reached a certain point, their books were suddenly off by exactly that amount (minus 1 cent). While everybody else was scratching their heads about the missing 21 million dollars, I recognized the number, and knew exactly what the problem was. They were storing the number as a 32 bit signed int which had overflowed. That's also how I got promoted from the support desk to a software developer.

IMHO, this is possibly why the max number of bitcoins was designed to be 21 million. Even though the number is not stored as an int in the bitcoin clients, it still avoids a lot of potential problems across platforms, and in scripts, and in data transfer to other systems in other formats. Just a thought.

You see, between all the proprietary crap messing with peoples heads, and all the technology egos, and those daytime prisons they call public schools, it becomes really hard to find a good programmer.

IMHO, the best way to find a great programmer is to find some high-school kid who hasn't been corrupted by the public school system, who can think analytically, and who has a good attitude, and train him.

... but you made my point though, (the same is true with MS security too) you can get it right if you go through a bunch of bullshit, but they always make it a pain in the ass, or gouge you.

Everything abut Microsoft is frustrating. Constant popupups, talking nagging paper-clips, can only log in one user account at a time unless you pay out the nose, a window8 GUI trying to shove apps down out throats even if we're a desktop, all versions of word are more incomparable with each other than open office is, how they try to force me into bing, how they try to obsolete older versions like XP - even though it works perfectly fine on older PC's, even worse, how they try to obsolete older versions of office. Don't even get me started with VB VBscript, and their basterdized versions of html and javascript.

However, all of these annoyances are not problems, they are symptoms of a company who can't compete on service, so instead they try to compete by shoving proprietary crap down our throats. Then they wonder why companies that 'get it' like google, waltz in and rip them a new asshole, while linux effectively kicked their ass in the dataceter market. I know being able to gouge the fuck out of people with proprietary licensing is like a security blanket to them, but really, in order to compete they just need to give it up. It's dulling them.

IMHO, the problem is that these companies with the help of the government want to use intellectual property rights laws to control people. These (IPR) laws are the problem, and DRM is the tool they intend to use to impose them. That's why I don't think fighting DRM will solve our problems. They'll never stop this crap till we cut it off at the root, and stand up against the laws being imposed on us.