Yes, but you don't need to sell your BitCoins, the people you are buying goods from are the ones that do that. It's similar to how you can't directly accept credit cards, but Amazon can, so they are still very useful.
When the governments decide to shut down Bitcoin, it will probably be in the "exchanging bitcoins for money" area, since that's relatively easy to regulate. But it's hard to convince Offshore Bank Of Unfriendly Country to not exchange Bitcoins for money in person, so big "dealers" will have no trouble making the trip and getting their cash. This will involve more effort, so prices for goods sold in Bitcoins will increase.
Similarly, if everyone could grow and sell their own pot, prices would come down. Make that illegal, and people want more money for their work. The same effect will occur if cashing out Bitcoins becomes difficult.
Debt for an individual is a choice. However our monetary system mandates that some people or entities must always be in debt. If there were no debt there would be almost no money in circulation.
So while you say that debt is a choice, it is impossible for everyone to be debt-free. If everyone stopped borrowing (consumers, industry and government) in this country, we would have a complete economic breakdown.
This is like saying smoking is a choice: from the perspective of the single potential smoker, it is. From the perspective of the marketer this is unimportant as they don't need you to smoke, they just need some people to smoke.
I'm amused that you think it is possible to rewrite the whole thing without entering super brain mode. In my experience, generally the only way to reproduce such legacy reports is by reverse engineering how they currently work. (which will require super brain mode based on the above described current complexity) One would think someone in the business would know what the report is supposed to do, but I frequently encounter cases where no one does, they just want the report to work the way the old one did, whatever the heck that was.
I know of no solution not involving time travel to solve that for legacy reports and systems. Obviously going forward one can worry about documentation, etc. but with legacy stuff it is already too late to implement those rules.
Which describes what I was dealing with perfectly. Unfortunately the guy before me was a rather brilliant python programmer writing rails code on an extremely short deadline. I at least had the luxury of having a short in person meeting with the person using the report which allowed me to clean up some misfeatures that had been implemented due to miscommunication over the phone. (Person using the report was out of state)
One thing I don't like is nothing on Buxfer's site tells you they are dead - I was considering signing up as a new customer, but suspicious due to the lack of blog activity and the questions if they are dead on GetSatisfaction.
They looked like a really decent web 2.0 style personal finance manager, with some really slick features. Way nicer than Mint.
I think gojomo has a really good idea here. However, there is no reason to bias it against Google's ad network. We need an advanced search option to find non-ad supported sites, that behind the scenes attempts to filter out every known ad network.
The use case wouldn't be an all the time thing, it would be when you are searching and get results that are overly polluted with ad-based content. Having the option to filter to non-ad based content lets you focus on those sites that have a motivation other than page views for providing content. I imagine this would include both sites actually selling products and non-profit sites like Wikipedia and open source.
Yes, and it could also be sensitive to the screen-area devoted to ads. As in, discard all results where >40% of the above-the-fold area is paid advertisements.
This is a common misconception caused by quoting mean life expectancy at birth, when the distribution is highly asymmetrical. High infant death rates cause low life expectancy at birth, but the life expectancy if you live to age 5 can be massively longer.
A 5 year old ancient Roman was expected to live to 48. About 35% of the ancient Roman population was over 30 years old. The highest listed age is 76, which is the life expectancy of a 70 year old, an age that about 1 in 50 ancient Romans achieved. http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/Life.html
Excellent point. But that still doesn't leave many grandmothers around (1 in 3 at best?). And they didn't have many years beyond their reproductive age.
Um, think about your numbers a bit more. 1 in 3 what? If 1/3 of the population was over 30 and the average lifespan of people living past infancy was 48, there were probably a lot of grandmothers around. Especially if women were having their first children in their late teens, which is just a guess but seems likely.
http://www.ngbasic.com/ - Has more of the classic BASIC feel, opening a window that looks like ye olde BASIC interpreter, but requires two clicks before you can find it.
http://www.quitebasic.com/ - Also starts at the interpreter, but with a more complicated example program.
1) How hard would it to write a JavaScript/HTML port of it? I don't see why anyone in the modern day and age should need to download and install a program to play with BASIC. It should be possible to interpret BASIC directly in JavaScript, all within the browser. I don't believe any server round trips should even be necessary.
2) Have you let David Brin know about your effort? He seems to be doing talks on the subject still as recently as '09, so he might be able to at least mention it to people.
At what age do you think Alice and Mindstorm are usable?
The main thing that catches my attention on Alice is it is targeted at High School or College level, but the article talks about his 11 year old son.
Where are the programming tools for 6 to 8 year olds?
(I started in BASIC that early, but then again I was programming C by 11, so I'm probably an exception...)
Unless you think farmers in Colombia and electric companies in California are going to start accepting bitcoins directly?