Purchasing a $2 cup of coffee with Bitcoins bought for $1 would trigger $1 in capital gains for the coffee drinker and $2 of gross income for the coffee shop.

That seems very common-sensy, but it just raises questions/flames about what you're contrasting it to. Right away, you ought to be thinking, "If I did the same thing with Euros or Pesos, how would that differ?"

If Bitcoin were treated as a foreign currency, ordinary -- not capital gains -- tax rates would apply. Losses would be easier to deduct, however.

Oh.

I don't really know which (if either) of these policies is good (it's all so arbitrary) but I know at least one of them is stupid.

Holy smokes, that's actually a pretty good challenge! I may have to try that myself, albeit at a slower pace. I assume (ass, u, me whatever) that he had the ability to do this with no distractions like a real job, but it's a great start! Thanks for that, although I have to say his "put together your own degree program" kinda reads like a 4 hour workweek spam.

It's a master's degree program from what I can tell. I'd rather start at the undergraduate level. What's sad is that even though I denigrate my math skills/comprehension I've still probably forgotten more than most non-STEM people have ever learned. SIGH.

What does it mean when your biggest regret from high school at age 40 is I wish I hadn't slept through Algebra II & Advanced Math instead of "I wish I had asked Suzy out" or, I dunno, gone out for the wrestling team? :)

I've always wondered what it is that prevents us from creating a fully accredited* Computer Science Degree (bachelor's) completely online, for cheap. I'm not talking code-school, I mean let's learn Computer Science, with all the math and non-shortcuts that entails. The "industry" might want programmers, but *I* want to be more than that, and I'd like a formal education to get it without spending $30-40k/semester and would prefer to do it at my own pace while I continue working in the field. Perhaps this needs to be a Y Combinator style start-up. Courses from Algebra (yes, Algebra), Geometry, Trig, first principles kind of stuff focusing on the WHYS not just rote memorization. Sure, you'd still need the social sciences and what not (and I would be happy to just take those at the local community college for $cheap and transfer them in), but the real meat at the real school. Hell, it doesn't even have to be accredited if you actually learn something.

This also brings me to self-taught computer scientists: I've begun an adventure down "Teach myself math from scratch" lane because, at age 40, I'm still rather annoyed at my math education in high school. I was more concerned about learning to the test, not the concepts, and that's haunted me ever since. Anyone have recommendations for learning math starting from, say, Algebra I or II level (high school) that will actually teach in a way that will be useful rather than taking a test? Stuff that will carry over into future classes as the proper building blocks, etc?

Definitely, at least it's "opt-in" (for now). When my gf comes over, GN is already giving her times to get to our favorite restaurants, movie theaters, etc. Don't get me wrong, progress is great, but holy hell it's kinda creepy.

SHIT out of me. My girlfriend uses it and, well, who the fuck needs the NSA when you have Google figuring out what and where and why you do what you do. No thanks. /neo-luddite.

Next you are going to tell me that the Republicans want to push grandma off the cliff, take food from starving children, and ruin the environment.

Yes... What's your point?

Given the fact that a normal desktop PC cannot generate bitcoins in a reasonable amount of time, isn't it a given fact that we need another party to create or transfer those bitcoins?

No and no. "Creating" bitcoins is not economically practical for individual users any more, however you do NOT need a third party to hold your bitcoins. You can run wallet software on your PC and send and receive bitcoins without the need for any third party.

When another party creates those bitcoins for me, how can I be sure that they won't keep a copy for later use?

Sending you the bitcoins is not just a matter of sending you a copy of the bitcoin "file". For your wallet (which is an application running on your PC) to receive the bitcoins, it must not only get the "file" from the sender, but also verify with the blockchain (the public record of transactions) that they have sent the BTC to you. Once the transaction has been logged on the blockchain, they cannot spend the bitcoins, as the blockchain will reject any attempt to do so.

theres a VERY good chance you'll (as a techie) be in a group that pays a fuckton more than others since you aren't going to be the standard generic type of user who helps share the cost of the services they use.

Hard to say. It's possible but I wouldn't be so sure; I see nontechies do amazingly volumnous things that make me cringe, but you might be right that some of my habits more than balance that out. If I do happen to use twice as much bandwidth as my neighbor, though, then I'm ok with paying about twice as much; I'm not asking for a subsidy. Similarly, if I use half as much, I'd love to pay half as much. What I don't want, is my neighbor using twice as much bandwidth on the same medium as me, but because half of it is "Brand X bytes" that are exempt (yet no less costly for the infrastructure), that our bills are about the same and I essentially subsidize the sunday night congestion, or I that I'm paying for a portion of the overall possible bandwidth to be reserved for special use (e.g. bandwidth that could be freed to IP, stays reserved for proprietary protocols) that won't be available for me. The more directly we're charged in proportion to our actual impact, the better.

When you pay you internet provider, do you not feel that your agreement with them is for a pipe to the Internet and that ALL traffic over it is created equal?

Yes! We're not in disagreement on that point. I think there might be a little confusion here..

Why do you seem to think you should not only pay for the bandwidth ... but then pay extra because you use someone specific?

.. I have not argued that I should "pay extra because I used someone specific"; indeed I'm arguing directly against that. I want us all charged either by the [tera]byte (or by some other fair objective measure of cost, though I think it's hard to beat the byte). I don't want my impact to cost differently than someone else's, though. And I think "Chevrolet made a deal with the toll road owner," is a horrible reason to charge me a different rate for the road, whether that happens to appear to be discount or an extra charge: because we all know that it's really an extra charge, for everyone, even the Chevrolet owners. (It's not like anyone's grocery expenses really went down when we all start using those damn track-my-purchases-for-a-"discount" cards.)

Live tv and on-demand video, going through the tv cable provider's standard routes for said services. Both the article and summary acknowledge this.

Ars quotes WSJ and appears to directly contradict what you just asserted:

"Under the plan Apple proposed to Comcast, Apple's video streams would be treated as a 'managed service' traveling in Internet protocol format—similar to cable video-on-demand or phone service," the Journal wrote. "Those services travel on a special portion of the cable pipe that is separate from the more congested portion reserved for public Internet access."

The nonstandard portion. Neither ClearQAM nor IP. That part that you cannot access or interoperate with, unless you make a special deal with Comcast.

And it makes sense. If it were the provider's standard routes, then Apple wouldn't have to negotiate. They would slide a piece of paper across the table, and the Comcast negotiator would pick it up and look at the "0" and tears would form in his eyes. The Comcast negotiator would sniffle, turn to his tech, and plead through his tears, "can't we do anything?" The tech would sadly shake his head, "No, they're building on top of the standards, like Netflix, or the old non-cablecard Tivos before them. We're going to have to be satisfied with collecting money from our customers in exchange for a service, like all the other industries do." And then the Comcast negotiator's sniffles would turn into a horrible wail.

INDIRECT toll roads, where charges vary by car manufacturer or the brand of fuel inside them, or some other nonsense. If it were only toll roads, paid by all the users as they use it, it really wouldn't be a problem at all. (IMHO that would be downright good news for everyone, and we can only hope we're able to get to such a situation.) It's the bundling and attempts change at what point a person makes a decision about when to pay for bandwidth, to obscure costs and control who can cost-effectively particate, that is so ugly here.

Bill me, not the people who made my HTPC (Apple, in this story's case). Charge me the road's toll, not Chevy or Chevron. We need the numbers foremost, not obscured (and almost certainly inflated as a result of being freed of market forces).

If there's a cap, no party's traffic should ever be exempt from it. No party's traffic should be billed at a different rate. (If there are different rates, it ought to be based on stuff like QoS, time-of-day, and so on -- actual cost/congestion factors.)

If your local power utility sold appliances that were exempt from KWH charges (or made deals with certain manufacturers so that their appliances were exempt), nobody would be fooled by such obvious bullshit or think the appliances in question were "great deals." Everyone would be demanding that the government either stop enforcing the monopoly, or else prohibit such behavior.

This is blatantly corrupt, and at a minimum, needs to become a violation of franchise terms.

If this was about standard TV then there wouldn't be any negotiations with Apple at all. People could just plug the cable into their HDHomeRun or Apple-brand ClearQAM decoder, and Comcast wouldn't have any say in the matter.

Being nonstandard is how Comcast leverages and gets a seat at the table and prevents all the usual market forces from taking effect.

they'd follow the order. But what makes you think a person taking part in the WoT would refuse a court order where a CA would roll over?

The WoT lets you resist this scenario. If you have multiple paths, then you can force your adversary to point guns at multiple people. Those people might not all be as easy to find or intimidate as one person (they might not all be in the same jurisdiction) and also, each one of them can more safely spill-the-beans without getting blamed. "I'm not the one who leaked that you're MitMing my friend; it was one of the other signers!"

Let's say the US federal government signed Joe's key. You don't fully trust the US government (I'm putting that mildly; laugh it up, post-2013 mainstream) , so you're not sure that key is really Joe's. Let's say the Chinese government also signed Joe's key. You don't trust them either. Yet I bet you're fairly sure you have Joe's key, because it's difficult to imagine an adversary who is coercing both of those signers. And you trust it even more if your wife also signed that key, too.

You should meet Jennifer. (Side-effect: both Josh and Joe will be grateful.) Until then, 43% may be worse than flipping a coin but it's still a whole lot better than zero, and it's the best thing we have.

People have been trying to think of something better. And it always comes back to you meeting Jennifer, or for some group of people (or entities) to step up and start meeting a whole lot more people (perhaps state governments or even .. (my idea here) banks should be prolific signers), and for Joe to teach his non-geek friends to get in on all this.

As to what can be done about it, switching from PGP to X.509 code signing would be an obvious candidate.

The "obviously stupid" candidate, maybe. Surely that idea doesn't stay on the table for more than a second or two before everyone starts laughing.

Whatever it is that you do, in order to be able to trust an X.509 CA, you can do the same exact thing to trust a PGP CA. Go meet them.

The difference is that if you're not quite able to do that (as is the case for many many people; i.e. nearly everyone; I have never heard anyone say they actually "met" the Verisign signer), then with PGP (huh.. except I have met signers here) you have a backup plan B: partially trust a few people, and require a conspiracy in order for you to lose. With X.509 that plan isn't on the table: if you don't trust the sole signer, then either you live with that increased risk, or else you are denied ability to communicate.