Hrm, the article refers to DNA evidence as a "gold standard". I suppose its better than fingerprint analysis, but I do wonder if DNA evidence is also trusted too far.

Hrm, that "litany of lies" seems rather informative to me...

911 may be ambiguous for phone systems where you must dial 9 to get to the outside. For instance, at my workplace we had serious trouble with employees dialing 911 by accident. People dialed 9 to get out, then 1 for international, then another 1 either by mistake, or as the first part of an area code. The emergency services were not amused.

No, he is correct. There are two types of inflation, monetary inflation and price inflation. Your parent is clearly talking about the latter. This is the standard definition of the term inflation (look at the titles of the wikipedia articles there).

By that definition, bitcoin should be measured against what it can buy, or the real value of bitcoins. However, few things can be bought directly with bitcoins, and even some of those things might automatically fluctuate with the value of bitcoins in USD. So when bitcoin fluctuates against the dollar, that is indeed inflation/deflation due to what can be bought. You can substitute USD for CAD, AUD, or Euro as you prefer, that is just the only way to buy most of the goods on any reasonable price index. Your comparison with imports/exports is mistaken.

If bitcoin was adopted by a country, most of these problems would disappear, at least for those living in that country anyways. Since you must tie bitcoin to any other currency at the moment in order to buy necessary goods, let us use the fiction I'll call "Euro-Bitcoin", which is bitcoin as tied to the euro currency, instead of giving bitcoin a country of its own (which would change the current situation considerably). You will notice some bonus deflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro decrease relative to bitcoin, and some bonus inflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro rise relative to bitcoin, or should the market decide to raise the prices of common goods (which can happen completely separately from monetary inflation). This will be negligible for our discussion, as that plagues all currencies, not just bitcoin.

Now, the fact that you cannot just buy milk at the local grocery store using bitcoin creates another problem for Euro-Bitcoin. This is that someone must be willing to exchange bitcoin for euros in order for your Euro-Bitcoin value to be spendable. Now, the price at which someone is willing to exchange your bitcoins depends on the perceived demand for bitcoins in the market. If people want to own 10x as many bitcoins, the price of bitcoins jacks up, and the value of Euro-Bitcoin increases. If the reverse happens, the price of bitcoins plummets and the value of Euro-Bitcoin decreases. This is the inflation which the GP was talking about, the purchasing power of the bitcoin, with respect to buying real goods, can decrease or increase significantly according to bitcoin demand.

Right now, should any one major holder of bitcoins get rid of a significant portion of their bitcoins for the euro, it is conceivable that would saturate the market for bitcoins and decrease demand. This could cause the price of bitcoins to drop fantastically, since there are only so many people trying to buy, say, several hundred thousand euros worth of bitcoins. Bear in mind that since most bitcoins are being held, rather than being used, in general the pool of bitcoins available for exchange is much smaller, so the whole bitcoin economy must fit inside a fraction of the total Euro-Bitcoin value of bitcoins in existence. Should any significant fraction of that value be suddenly put up for exchange, that will tank the price. That may or may not happen, but if it does, it will mean inflation, lots of inflation.

I think it is also reasonable for the price of bitcoin to drop gradually, which also creates significant inflation (by definition), but that won't kill bitcoin, only decrease the value of everyone's bitcoin.

Personally, I don't like the "rich get richer" nature of (monetary) deflationary currencies, but bitcoin can suffer from inflation under the wrong circumstances.

The laws that the RIAA folks got passed would say otherwise, with very stiff penalties.

mod parent up

While I am a linux user already, a friend of mine recently said something along these lines. He then qualified it with something like:

"But then, linux probably won't have AAA games until windows 9. Now it seems to me that every other version of windows sucks (2K/XP, Vista/7), and the version after it is just fine. So I'll probably continue using windows if 9 doesn't suck. At least, until windows 10, which will suck. I'll probably switch then."

crap, posting to undo mod.

While this would be a useful tool to keep alive the 2nd Amendment should gun control actually begin disarming the US public, I have some concerns that the primary use of this design will be something else. Now of course, trying to keep technology like this down would be silly and it may already exist in some more obscure corner of the internet, but it probably isn`t something I would put money towards.

Lets assume that the gun this produces is reliable, but only a one or two shot weapon. It is plastic and evades metal detectors (ok, perhaps the bullets don`t), It small and concealable, it is a handgun. It has a relatively low cost. Some types of crime would benefit from such a weapon becoming readily available. Smaller armed robberies could make use of this, as well as people looking for an extra means of self defense should one of your associates turn on you. Burglars could be more likely to have guns. Regular citizens would have some trouble owning these guns under certain gun-control laws, since if the police finds them, you're in trouble, which might not be the case for other weapons. If you submit one of these for registration, you missed part of the point that these guys are fundraising for.

That said, I believe the use to the US militia will be relatively small unless gun control actually begins to prevent people from actually owning rifles and handguns to a significant portion of the population which has not happened yet, and due to the power of the (perhaps somewhat idiotic) NRA lobby, is unlikely to happen soon. Given the choice between this and a metal handgun, you choose the metal handgun unless you have to conceal it from, say, a metal detector. Having only one handgun shot probably won't help you that much against the armored government agents you'd be up against should a revolution actually occur.

It is easy enough to buy bullets,even with gun regulations. Sure if guns are completely banned in some places, it will be moderately difficult to acquire ammo. However, most places in Canada and the US only have gun-registries. For instance, handguns where I am here have to be stored in a secure location, separate from ammo, and you have to call the police if you want to take it anywhere (and tell them you are going to a shooting range). Getting ammo isn`t a problem, its getting a gun that the police cannot track as easily.

Even in places where ammo is not available, it may not be illegal and can be safely acquired via a vacation to the US. Finally, should ammo be illegal, it is much easier to sell bullets discreetly than guns. Seriously, how are you going to prevent someone from, say, hiding a bullet in a computer case and shipping it (or even putting it through checked baggage).

Impressive. I suspect that sort of business model could work very well for many sorts of goods that have a near-zero reproduction cost (even if that small cost may add-up per person or if the R&D costs are very large).

Excellent post. (Posting to keep this in my slashdot history, I could save the link somewhere, but meh)

I am familiar with clicking on the "I agree" checkbox when buying games. What was seriously annoying to me today, was that when I opened steam I had to click through an "agree" button *in order to access existing games*. For what it is worth, Valve is still better than the rest of the gaming industry concerning issues like this, but that doesn't mean that they aren't being asshats too.

Awesome post. And now I don't have mod points.

I'll second this. The freezer trick does work, and I havee used it to bring a hard drive back to life for just long enough to get the data I wanted off of it. It would work fine for a very short amount of time after boot, and then it would start producing more read errors, and eventually would become completely unreadable until turning the computer off and on again. After putting it in the freezer, the amount of time I had with the drive was enough for me to say my goodbyes and copy my data. Naturally, drive necromancy of this sort only creates temporary slave drives, and I suspect condensation would drive it even further into the depths of Hades, but the data really is all that is important in these cases.