"she paid in bitcoin, which was transferred into actual dollars "so there's a fixed price ... [and] we can actually pay her money back, if she changes her mind"
Seems no different than if the buyer had sold her Bitcoin and paid Virgin Galactic in cash. The real trick will be when they can accept Bitcoin, keep the Bitcoin, and make any refunds and adjustments in Bitcoin.
True, but they were able to process a single quarter-million dollar transaction and easily turn that into 'real' cash. That's still a pretty decent accomplishment for magic internet money.
Let's say you accept bitcoin but immediately convert it to USD. In future one of your suppliers also decides to accept bitcoin. Now you can pay your supplier directly without the USD conversion step. This wouldn't have happened without you actually deciding to accept bitcoin in the first place.
I don't see any other way to bootstrap a new currency.
> transacting fiat currency generally costs a vendor ~3%
1. Bitcoin is no less a fiat currency than the U.S. dollar or Japanese yen.
2. For small retail transactions, yes, 3% seems right. Larger transactions, however, are generally done by wire. These transfers carry a fixed fee and are generally a very small percentage of the transaction value.
> 1. Bitcoin is no less a fiat currency than the U.S. dollar or Japanese yen.
Depends on what you mean by "fiat currency", which tends to get used with a few different (if related) meanings. One is "non-backed state-issued currency". Under that definition it isn't. Another is "currency with no intrinsic value". Under that definition it is.
AirDrop does do what they are describing. Airdrop uses ad hoc wifi to enable iOS devices to communicate with each other without a router or some other networking device in the middle.
I like how Shaun Inman describes some of the benefits of journaling in "Lift Off. The Last Rocket Development Diary". He wrote, “By documenting your creative process regularly, you can identify patterns that make you appreciate the too infrequent peaks, help avoid the pits and hopefully make future creative climbs a little less daunting.”
There are things to learn from an accounting of history. A development journal is among the most personal of histories (not personal as in "private", but personal as in "relates to my daily life"). If you're not going to study your own history, one may ask why study any history at all?
Well, it surely was lacking in the evidence department.
However, it certainly squares with my experience. Heck, I was up at 430am this morning, standing in my garage and giving an impromptu lecture to my clothes dryer about the math behind Kalman filters and Dempster-Shafer theory, because I had some ideas in my brain burning to get out, and talk out loud imaginary lectures do that for me (YMMV). Kind of hard to get that kind of solitude and privacy in a workplace where you have to measure every 15 minutes of productivity, or work in a open work space, or, you get the idea.
Interesting, I find sometimes I have to dictate into a recorder app to get the ideas out best, I suppose those end up being said in a lecture style a lot of the time, but that had never occurred to me.
So you aren't alone in that habit. I find listening to those notes something I don't do quickly enough but the number of times I've listened to an old one and heard myself say "... Have to watch out for X I suppose, anyway..." where X is a problem/bug that showed up later and was hard to track down has convinced me this can be a really useful exercise.
So that means that no third-party services should be allowed?
When I send an email to a company that uses third-party customer support software to consume, parse, and host the email; I don't agree to the TOS of the customer support vendor.
When I send an email to a company that uses third-party software to parse and archive email for legal purposes; I don't agree to the TOS of that email parsing and archiving company.
It would be ridiculous and impossible to expect that I would agree to the TOS of each and all pieces of software used in the processing of my communications with a company.
> Those vendors aren't using the content of your email to further their own interests other than the expected function of delivering the mail reliably.
It's clear Kickstarter has failed in trying to convince people that "Kickstarter is not a store".
* "I would order this..."
* "I wouldn't be interested in purchasing..."
* "I often buy things [from Kickstarter] in the hundreds..."
* "I have no intention of actually buying a printer..."
Well, Kickstarter is hosting mostly pre-order businesses.
This project for instance is just being advertised as a cheap alternative to things that already exist (claiming they don't would be a big stretch of the implementation details).
Kickstarter would lose most of its business by not allowing these kind of projects. People are more likely to bid in stuff they can easily figure out, rather than completely novel and seemingly far-fetched ideas.
If someone has information that they only want certain people to see, would circumventing a technological measure that controls access to that information be allowed under this bill? For example, internal documents, trade secrets and documents under NDAs?
If someone has information they only want licensed people to see, would circumventing a technological measure that controls access to that information be allowed under this bill? For example, publishers of stock market analysis which is released only to licensed subscribers.
> If someone has information that they only want certain people to see, would circumventing a technological measure that controls access to that information be allowed under this bill? For example, internal documents, trade secrets and documents under NDAs?
Among other things, this would generally be a violation of the CFAA.
> If someone has information they only want licensed people to see, would circumventing a technological measure that controls access to that information be allowed under this bill? For example, publishers of stock market analysis which is released only to licensed subscribers.
Depends what you mean. If an unlicensed subscriber tried to gain access from scratch, then the CFAA would be applicable; if a licensed subscriber leaked large portions of the document to an unlicensed subscriber, then it would at least be a (standard) copyright violation. (If they only leaked specific bits of information, it probably wouldn't involve circumventing a technological measure, but contract law would be applicable.)
How could you know the answer to a legal question offhand?
Is this FUD? The point of DMCA anti-circumvention is that it makes a crime out of things that were otherwise legal, not tack on charges to things that are illegal for other reasons.
FTFA:
"- It amends Section 1201 to make it clear that it is completely legal to "circumvent" if there is no copyright infringement.
"- It legalizes tools and services that enable circumvention as long as they are intended for non-infringing uses.
"- It changes Copyright Law to specify that unlocking cell phones is not copyright infringement."
Or you could read the text the bill adds to DMCA:
It is not a violation of this section to use, manu-
8 facture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise
9 traffic in any technology, product, service, device, compo-
10 nent, or part thereof that is primarily designed or pro-
11 duced for the purpose of facilitating noninfringing uses of
12 works protected under this title by circumventing a tech-
13 nological measure that effectively controls access to that
14 work, unless it is the intent of the person that uses, manu-
15 factures, imports, offers to the public, provides, or traffics
16 in the technology, product, service, device, component, or
17 part to infringe copyright or to facilitate the infringement
18 of a copyright.’’.
Why would you expose such information in a way that it is protected only by a mechanism that the public has access to? It seems like you are asking if fixing the DMCA would remove protection for irresponsible behavior.
IIRC, the DMCA makes it a criminal act, whereas otherwise it might only be governed by civil law. If I'm contractually obligated to only read a stock market report myself, but I show it to a friend, do I deserve jail time, or just to get sued?
What I really should have asked: Does the provision that allows you to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to works" allow you to circumvent network and data center security measures? I'd expect not, but I don't see where the bill draws a line between devices (phones, game consoles, dvds) and other types of information stores.
I've been worried about this, ever since their acquisition. However, if they shutdown FeedBurner, there would be a LOT of broken links suddenly left on the web. Kind of like bit.ly or tinyurl suddenly disappearing. I imagine the public backlash from this makes it a bit more tricky for Google to drop FeedBurner, than it was to drop Reader.
