Arguing that the ends justify the means is a very dangerous thing. Even if it seems correct in one very specific case, the broader principle leads to tremendous injustice and misery and suffering.
So even if the force seems valid in this context, it is irrelevant because it fails when generalized.
I agree that the end doesn't always justify the means. But sometimes it does. The key is to find a balance. The world isn't as black and white as people here tend to think. People here don't think that the world is as black and white as others tend it think, either. It's a bit difficult to define the nuances of every philosophical construct in a forum post. |
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He takes care of himself very well. He maintains a good shelter, feeds himself and waters himself whether it be through nature or exchanging with his neighbors. He hasn't particularly created any wealth but he always returns what he takes. Joe has caused no loss to another man nor any particular gain.
Is Joe an evil man?
Are you saying that people who don't create wealth are evil? I'd like to hear the reasoning behind why anyone would possibly consider this man evil. His net effect on the system is 0, to say that one way or the other is evil is to so that there is a moral obligation to leech or to produce, and that is absurd. I don't know where he is going, but according to certain social theories, a person who doesn't produce a net gain for society is still a burden upon society, for no other reason than he takes up space. This is an argument used by Marx himself, and some of his immediate followers, to rationalize away an individual's right to life away. The basic argument is thus.... As long as an individual is producing at least as much, if not slightly more, than he consumes (including landspace consumption) then he is a net benefit for the society at large. Once he is no longer producing a net benefit for society at large, and has little prospects toward doing so, then he is of no further benefit to society and his life is forfit. This is the basis for the 'total life' theory of health care management, or something like that, that attempts to place a social value to the average individual based upon their age. Thus, small children are of low value, because they can be replaced and educated and little benefit (to society) has been lost, and old people are also of little value because they have already produced the greater part of their lifetime productivity, but teens and young adults have a high value because they have already been 'vested' with education and resources for life and have a high future potential for productive returns to society. if you take this viewpoint as valid, then the self-supporting hermit is evil because it is assumed that he took the resources from society (by the act of growing up and being 'educated' and 'socialized' and presumedly eating along the way) and has chosen a life that fails to return those resources to society. |
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another way of thinking of this is all these silicon that otherwise would not be being put to use, hopefully academic/medical/govt projects will see the value in distributed computing such as this, protein folding, seti etc. The problem is usually working out how to break the task up into packets that might not necessarily be completed
If an academic wants to get processing done for his major project, this usually involves a block grant to buy processing time on some supercomputer. If, instead, these academics were able to break up the problem into distinct packets that can be distributed to a bitcoin-like pool and computed on video cards, they could get a huge project calculated in no time by simply offering Bitcoin in exchange for processing power. They only need to compete with the Bitcoin pools to attract that kind of power. As long as they offer slightly more for the same processing time, many of the pool miners would certainly consider it, and the price of Bitcoin would rise due to the block grants being used to buy up BTC to pay the pool members. |
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At the time, you're right, I wouldn't care. I certainly wouldn't refuse the assistance!
After the fact, I would support and bear witness to any claim that the 'neutral' bystander who was forced to help me had against the 'evil' one.
You don't think that's a little hypocritical? Without the "evil" bystander you would be dead. You owe him your life, yet you would like to punish him for saving it. What if the forced bystander died trying to save you, and you knew that he was forced to do so? |
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See, I can pull your bullshit too.
No even remotely close, not ballpark, not even universe. Flight is accomplished by use of the LAWS OF PHYSICS to OVERCOME the force of gravity. It is NOT accomplished by violating the law of gravity. Keep trying though. I'll keep laughing.  Oh, I'm sure that you have been laughing the whole time, I doubt it not. That is, after all, the primary motive of agitators like yourself. Just keep laughing. |
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Well done, indeed. Keep up the good work!
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Wow. I'm somewhat astounded by the intellectual elitism.
It's not elitism to say Tea Partiers are morons. It's reality. Whatever your political inclination is. I suggest you paint with a narrower brush, or you might find that you offend the wrong forum member. It's a short trip back to newbie hell from where you are standing. So you will ban/censor people who disagree with your opinions? Yeah, that's my style. You can't find a dissenting opinion anywhere. |
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A future feature that would allow a person to 'withdraw' a particular public/private keypair from their wallet.dat and use that as cash directly has been discussed. The problem is only when the receiver doesn't trust the sender. Bitbills are based upon this concept. This is also somewhat how an online wallet service such as Mybitcoin.com works, as the funds sent to your receiving address are almost certainly not going to be used by yourself. Thus, an online wallet service adds to the anonimity of the group. The problem with such online wallet services is that, because this kind of service requires a large group to contribute meaningfully to anonimity, the wallet service then becomes a primary target for government leverage to be applied. But what if such a wallet service were to pop up that was, itself, anonymous. Such as on Tor as a hidden service, with no connections to real world individuals. Well, the trust level would necessarily be lower, due to the fact that if someone were to steal the coins, including the site owner, there would be even less recourse for users to pursue the thief than there is with regard to MtGox. Still, I could imagine myself putting small sums into such a service, risk of theft would still be a limiting factor.
I had an idea of how this could work effectively with no trust needed, no risk of theft, only minimal trust required that the person running the anonymizer won't "out" you. Suppose 100 people wanted all their coins anonymized at a pre-determined time next Saturday, and ran an open-source anonymizer client that could peek in their wallet.dat and sign transactions proposed by the server. The server's job is to coordinate all 100 of these clients to simultaneously mix-in and mix-out their coins into a single gigantic transaction. Come that time on Saturday, each of those 100 clients identifies, to the server, the transaction inputs they intend to anonymize. Each of those 100 clients also generates a bunch of spare receiving addresses so they can get their coins back, and sends those to the server too. (No private keys nor signatures are shared). The server constructs one HUGE transaction that combines all the funds from everybody seeking anonymity. It then, in random order and in the same transaction, spends the funds back out to the spare addresses provided by the clients, always in fixed denominations example: (50 BTC, 25, 10, 5, 1, .5, .1, .05, .01 etc), and only one output per address. Now the catch is, the server doesn't have any private keys and can't sign this transaction, it can only propose it to the clients. So the server proposes this monster transaction to each of those 100 clients. The clients automatically look at it and make sure they are not being cheated, that every spend they are authorizing is balanced by incoming coins to the spare addresses. When all clients concur, they all produce the signatures needed. If all of the clients sign off on the transaction, the server packages it into a complete transaction and it's sent to the p2p network and block chain and the Saturday party is then over. If not all the clients sign off (e.g. suppose 3 of them got disconnected), then the transaction is forgotten and the process is repeated with the remaining 97 clients. Importantly, new destination addresses are selected and the outputs rescrambled so as to minimize any attack advantages from comparing the proposals. If the server is unable to get signatures from all clients, the offending clients are removed and the proposal process repeats in a loop until eventually a full consensus of signatures is achieved on the remaining activity. Once done, anonymized funds can clearly be traced back to the anonymizing transaction, but no further. It would be impossible for anyone to connect the input amounts with the outputs. For example, someone sending 444.13 BTC into the anonymizer would receive outputs of 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 25, 10, 5, 1, 1, 1, 1, .1, .01, .01, .01... to nineteen different addresses... all of which would be randomly jumbled up with hundreds or thousands of other outputs in the exact same denominations. If these anonymizing transactions were only done once every Saturday, they would result in a significantly large pot, as compared with daily frequency or greater. When mixed, all coins coming out of the pot are completely indistinguishable from one another, perhaps almost as good as freshly mined coins if the pot is large enough. This is an awesome idea, but pretty much requires that users produce a clean second wallet so that it's not possible for their original wallet to mix the clean coins back into the unclean transactions. The downside would be that it would be impossible to obscure the intent to launder coins. |
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Ron Paul started it, Sarah Palin fucked it.
Ron Paul, whom I respect, didn't start it either. Actually, the Tea Party was started by the Ron Paul supporters to get people to fund Ron Paul 2008 campaign. When the presidentials were over, Fox News, in their line of copying Ron Paul rethoric, co-opted it. No, sorry. The 'Tea Party' was started many years after the Tea Parties on April 15th and on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The idea was started by libertarians & like people, picked up by Ron Paul supporters leading into the 2007 Republican nomination cycle (who are also far more libertarian than the rest of the Republican Party), and co-opted by the Republican Party around 2009 after it became apparent that it wasn't going to fade away. I was there for most of it, I watched it happen. |
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So I'm four hours online, whats wrong?
Four hours as recorded from the perspective of the forum server. If you are not browsing, you time out and the server won't count the time after that. If you just browse randomly or too fast, the server might flag you as a bot. So searching the forums and learning about Bitcoin takes at least four hours of active browsing. You will also need a few more posts. |
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Ive been having a million questions running though my head but no place to ask them until I finally remembered this website has a forum!
Here they are, answer one or all, everything helps.
1.) Can I/is it difficult to set up my own pool with me and my friends? Is it worth it?
Difficult for your average Windoze user, sure. Not difficut for anyone who has ever tried to install Linux and enjoyed the learning experience. It's not a project for non-geeks.
2.) How fast would my computer have to mine to make solo mining worth it? Is there hard numbers for this?
This is case specific. No one can rationally answer this for you except you. My best guess is that it's probably not worth it. I don't mine, myself.
3.) I currently mine at around 95Mhash/s on this computer...The first night I started mining I found a block. How lucky was I?
Incrediblely lucky. Go buy a lottery ticket before it wears off. |
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I would say that this would explain some strange behaviors I've seen from my own client, that I don't run continuously.
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Ron Paul started it, Sarah Palin fucked it.
Ron Paul, whom I respect, didn't start it either. |
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The Tea Party movement is not grassroots but astroturf.
You keep telling yourself that, despite all of the evidence. Don't let the facts disturb you. |
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Case in point: a poor family in America has a car, two TV's, refrigeration, running water, soap, food, and an Xbox.
Ha! That's cutting the poor family short! I am related (by marriage) to a family that, due to disabilites from birth, the parents don't (and really never have) work. The only income they have is Social Security Income (the disability version of Social Security, pays even less then normal SS) totaling to about $1200 per month. With this, they have in addition to all of the above; a Playstation II, a PC newer and more powerful than my own, an entertainment center with a 32" flatscreen & basic cable, broadband internet, three cellphones on pre-paid service plans, microwave oven, DVD & DVR, multiple MP3 players and CD-R capable CD players, a two bedroom flat with rent control, and subsidies for heat and air conditioning. Hell, up until just last month, they even had a car so that friends (or their sighted and now of age oldest son) would be able to drive them to the grocery store. Did you know that a sighted child of a blind couple can get subsidies from the state for car insurance? I sure didn't. |
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Wow. I'm somewhat astounded by the intellectual elitism.
It's not elitism to say Tea Partiers are morons. It's reality. Whatever your political inclination is. I suggest you paint with a narrower brush, or you might find that you offend the wrong forum member. It's a short trip back to newbie hell from where you are standing. |
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Any tea partiers here?
Any one willing to pledge bitcoin to have bitcoin flyers distributed at NRA rally's?
I had attended a few 'Tea Parties' before they were co-opted by the Republican Party. I guess you could say I was a Teabagger before it was cool, or before it was square. Whichever. |
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AyeYo: It seems like you have to stop at some premise and either attack it's logic or accept it, because otherwise you slide into infinite regression. For example, I could say that the natural law that "all men own their own bodies" derives from the fact that all organisms deserve a chance at life, and in order for them to do so they must decrease entropy locally which requires economic ownership of not only their lives but resources around them. But then you could ask me to prove that all organisms are entitled to a chance at survival. I can't prove that. It is an assertion. The best I could do would be to say that by living you implicitly agree with my assertion. However, then you could argue that only some o
See, you've presented an argument for the claim made. NOW we have somewhere to start from, and you've even gone a few steps ahead. MoonShadow didn't want to do this because it leads to a dead end for him, so instead he just kept on the chant of wanting me to prove a negative. Now... I'll counter your idea of a "right to life" with the fact that life is taken away by forces out of our control ALL the time. If there is a natural law that says living beings have a right to life, then nature wouldn't be constantly and arbitraritly taking that life away. Natural laws CANNOT be disobeyed. The laws of physics CANNOT be ignored. The laws of mathematics CANNOT be altered. If there was a natural law granting a right to life, nothing would ever die. And I guess that it's impossible to fly, since there is a natural law that we call "gravity", huh? See, I can pull your bullshit too. Actually, I don't think that flying is violating the law of gravity because to do it you actually have to take gravity into account. I.E. create enough thrust or lift to counteract it. Would you agree? Yes, I would agree, I was using the tactic of mockery to highlight the ubsurdity that any 'natural law' is an absolute. The obvious differences between laws of science and laws of sociology notwithstanding. |
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rather than vomiting your ignorance all over this thread.
Oh, the imagery that this conjures! |
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