Making a zip gun from plastic tubing is, however. And that's what a 3-d printed gun barrel is.

-1 The article was submitted here by Laura Weinstein herself.

well conveniently the submitter and the author of the blog are the same person. Nice of the "editor" to put maximum trolling on the frontpage.

/ one of the worst articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. That's saying something since I was around during the Jon Katz days.

1: It's "wealth", not "money." Fractional reserve banking doesn't create more US dollars, it just creates a debt from one part to another and formalizes the transfer of debts instead of the physical exchange of bank notes.

2: Annuities and futures. If I loan you 500 bitcoins to buy a car, with terms that you pay me back over 12 months with interest, I have ~500 BTC as an asset I can promise to others.

Assuming for the moment as a given that the feds describe to shut down BitCoin (let's say Congress passes a law banning it), I'd wager that the implementation would not be not dissimilar to the approach they take against child porn. Ban the practice outright, impose punitive sentences for dealing with it, and employ police officers to track down those engaging in the practice.

And if that happens, I wager domestic bitcoin usage would just shutter rather than deal with persecution. Bitcoin 2 would be written to concur with the law, and likely overtake its predecessor due to simple market weight.

That's not what "legal tender" means.

I could set up shop today in New York State and accept only bitcoins if I wanted to. The government wouldn't stop me, and in fact they'd back up my right to set my prices as whatever my little heart desires, in whatever strange currency I want.

But as soon as I ask the police to force a shoplifter to pay, I'll wind up having to deal with dollars, because that's all the government will force anyone to pay a debt in. And if I am on the other end of that transaction, I might wind up having to convert some bitcoins to dollars at a sub-optimal time when the bill comes due.

(That I'll also have to pay my taxes in dollars and likely pay my vendors and suppliers in the same means I'll have to deal with some local currency regardless. but that's a different issue.)

1: It's $1,000 in assets. That includes a whole bunch of things beyond deposits, such as certain bonds.

2: That's $500 in revenue, not profit. From that revenue, they need to pay for all of their bills, and their payroll, and account for losses due to uncollectable accounts and outright thievery.

3: Inflation is a feature, not a bug. The work you did picking tomatoes last year is less valuable to the species than the work you did picking tomatoes today. The species would be better served if you used that same frugality to horde useful items instead of tokens, which is why the market rewards investment over savings.

Your liquid wealth is a properly formatted record and data trail at your bank's private data center. (more than a few bits. At least a few integers for value and date/time for each transaction you've ever had.)

I don't know about you, but these days I have very little money. If i want some I just redeem some of the debt that my credit unit owes me for some, although most merchants I deal with will accept an electronic debt assignment instead of requiring money.

Stop. Bitcoins have an intrinsic COST. The computing time that goes into producing a bitcoin is comparable to the paper and ink used to print a physical US dollar, or the wages and electricity cost of the "creation" of purely electronic dollars. (Which are really debts, rather than currency, but that's an entirely different boneheaded idea that the one you're postulating.)

Once a bitcoin is produced, it cannot be redeemed for an equal amount of computer time. In fact, using a bitcoin requires SOMEONE ELSE to pay for the verification chain that makes this electronic currency at all feasible.

(you're right that it's a bubble, and I'm not here to argue the system's inherent merits or flaws.)

The US dollar is backed up by an almost non-intuitive fact of modern society. It's legal tender for payment of debts. As in, if you don't pay your employees or pay for that meal in a restaurant, or if you just wrong someone more generally, the courts will denote whatever judgement is finally ordered against you in US dollars, and if your wealth is denominated in some other currency, you'll be subject to whatever market exchange rate you can manage to produce sufficient dollars to pay the debt.

Or, in short, "people who say the US dollar isn't backed up by anything don't know what they're talking about."

On a different note, though, I'd be interested if you could point to a US debt that was denoted in a weight of precious metal and not redeemed for sufficient value to satisfy the bond-holder. Just because in 1971 the President of the United States stopped offering gold for dollars doesn't mean the US "defaulted" any more than Wal-Mart selling out of ammo means they "defaulted' on that gift card you bought. (The phrase "Redeemable in gold on demand at the United States Treasury, or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank" was gone from bank notes decades before. And still did not specify the amount of gold.)

This isn't like Win 8 where you can't reach some features without going through the metro desktop. All the tools are still there, Apple hasn't threatened (yet) to prevent installation from other sources outside their app store. They aren't making you use their little app display thing (which is really the same thing as the start menu in windows) and they let you change the weird backwards scrolling they introduced.

I'm really not sure what your anger is about? That OS X has changed? It's been around for nearly 14 years, of course it's changed. Are you worried it's losing its unix roots? iOS is unix based as well!

Besides what would you switch to?

Ubuntu? It has the best support in terms of "just working" but they have ADD about their interface which has changed how many times over the last five years? And now they decided they didn't get enough derision over the Unity fiasco so they're going to go recreate it with the Mir/Wayland controversy.

Fedora/Redhat? Kind of ADD on features from time to time. Less easy to get some components working with normal hardware. Redhat especially isn't as bleeding edge. I guess if you're going linux that's the better route but either way you lose the polish.

Win7? I don't get this at all. MS isn't going to support Win 7 forever and you'll be forced into the nastiness that is whatever windows they come up with next. Microsoft is trying to recreate Apple's success with a worse interface. If you don't like Apple I can't understand why on earth you'd switch to MS.

I was getting this yesterday when reading an article on Mashible. I noticed that it stopped doing it by logging out of Facebook. Probably something I should be doing anyway to prevent them from tracking me all over the place

I think Andy is complaining about the bad CS degree mills that I've run into. I am definitely in the camp that a CS degree should be *harder* to get. That said, we should probably re-evaluate our interview process as an industry. Instead of grilling a kid on if he has skill X ... we need some way to determine if they are smart, competent, and motivated.

If you can't attract smart, competent, and motivated people ... maybe you need to re-examine your organisation.

Now that you mention it, I *can* hang around for DAYS on wifi. My record so far is two and a half *days* on wifi. But, I usually use the phone as a mobile computer while traveling. In those situations it's a little TV for around 4 to 5 hours and it's a phone for 2 to 4 hours during lay overs and while navigating airports. For several hours before and after, it's a GPS... but it gets to be plugged into a car during those times.

I bought a triple sized battery for my 4G phone. My phone is friggin' enormous now... but I can use it on 4G for 12 to 16 hours. I have yet to completely kill it... even while using it on coast to coast flights.

"You give us the right to make derivative works from your stuff" is just about as far away from "usual" as you can get it.

With a clause like that, Dropbox can do the smallest of alterations to your stuff, sell it, and not give you a dime. Even if it's something that you sell for $$ and don't give away for free. Hell, with a clause like that, Dropbox can take your software code and release it under any license they want, essentially as if they were you.

No part of the law requires them to not list out what they do. "Make any derivitive works necessary for this service" would do it. This isn't the law -- this is their lawyers being either dickish or lazy.