rkbabang

Funnily enough, I sold my house last year and deposited the biggest check of my life without stepping foot in a bank branch...I simply used the camera on my iPhone and my bank's mobile app. Branche's are obsolete for deposit needs, in my opinion. The only thing I've ever needed a physical bank branch for was to get a cashier's check for the deposit for my new house. Other than that, I haven't had any need to step foot in a branch in the last 5 years minimum. I will say, I can't speak to business needs as I don't own my own business. But I would envision bank branches slowly disappearing until there are only branches left in key locations. I've started using Fidelity's cash management account as a checking account. I have checks, an ATM card, direct deposit, mobile deposit, and online bill payment. I still have a savings account with a local credit union with a little money in it, just in case I need a physical bank to deposit a large check (Fidelity has a $10K limit on its mobile deposit feature) or to get a large cashiers check (I don't know how I would do that with Fidelity). But since you can move money back and forth from the bank account to the Fidelity account it is the best of both worlds, you can bank online 99% of the time, but have access to a bank if you need it. And since the Fidelity cash management account has no fees and most banks don't charge fees for savings accounts, I don't pay any monthly fees at all.

There is a picture of a woman on the there too. Trump hates women.

What was he thinking, he should have used a 5 pointed star and implied that she was a devil worshipper.

Unless the image was implying that she is corrupt because she is a Jew? But that makes no sense because she is not Jewish. I think people are looking for something that isn't there.

I remember sitting in psychology class learning about Pavlov thinking ‘those stupid dogs’, and then the bell rang and we all went to lunch.

A student, a priest and a politician are on a charter plane. Suddenly the pilot rushes out of the cockpit, puts on a parachute, yells "save yourselves" and jumps out of the plane. The student looks and tells the others that there are only two parachutes left. One of them will have to stay on the plane. "I should go." says the politician. "I am the smartest man in the world! The world needs me." Before the others can react, he puts a pack on his back and jumps out of the plane. The priest looking deeply sad tells the student "You are just a boy. You have your entire life ahead of you. I'm an old man who has done what I've been put on Earth to do. You can take the last parachute and save yourself..." The student interrupts him holding up two parachutes and says "But Father we can both live" The priest looked confused and said "It's a miracle! It's like the loaves and the fishes! God must still have plans for the both of us!" The student replied, "No, No, Father. It isn't that at all. The smartest man in the world just jumped out of the plane wearing my backpack!"

More Brexit humor in a short clip from Seinfeld. https://www.facebook.com/GetCafe/videos/1646505489005671/

Two guys walk into a bar. The third guy ducks.

You pay them to put on ninja suits, break down doors and look for illegal plant products. That's about it. That is what you get when government has a monopoly on justice. There is no incentive to protect you or to get your property back. What are you going to do stop paying them? Go with a different company who treats its customers better? Sorry but you don't have those options. So pay your taxes and shut your mouth.

An Astronomer, a Mathematician, and a Physicist were on a train. They just crossed the border into Scotland, when the Astronomer looked out of the window and saw 3 black sheep on the side of a hill. He said to the others "Look at that sheep are black in Scotland" The Physicist laughed and shook his head "No, no, no, my friend," replied the Physicist, "Some Scottish sheep are black." At which point the Mathematician looked up from his paper and glanced out the window. After a few second's thought he said blandly: "In Scotland, there exists at least one hill, upon which there exists at least three sheep, each having at least one black side."

It appears that as of today the EU has 1 GB of free space.

No I would have no desire to meet either of them either. John Stossel tried having lunch with Hillary, it went about as well as you would expect. ""I know who you are!" she interrupted. We were off. I give her credit: She argued with me for half an hour. Finally, she'd had enough. She just ignored me for the rest of the meal." John Stossel: Hillary Clinton and I had lunch. Here's what happened

This is both immensely sad and yet undoubtedly true, and tells you everything you need to know about the system.

They will get away with anything they made on the short positions, or they should. They exposed a flaw in a smart contract which held over $100M in assets. And they exposed it before The DAO had accepted any proposals and spent any funds. There should be some compensation for that. Had this happened a year from now it would have been a mess and no way to roll back the blockchain to stop it. Like Mt Gox, there was no way to return the funds without effecting hundreds of legitimate transactions. The only reason a fork is even under discussion here is because it can be done without effecting any other Ether transactions at all. It is still possible to close down the DAO and return everyone's Ether.

I agree fully with this. It's his right to claim and he owns it now. I doubt the court will agree. The court won't even fully comprehend what the case is about. I agree with you to a point. The DAO is code and nothing else. If the code allowed this then he did nothing wrong by doing it. But there is one level higher to consider. The DAO runs on the Etherium bock chain and the way that works is that if over 50% of the miners agree to a fork it forks. Anyone agreeing to a contract on the Ethereum blockchain needs to understand that as well. So while the attacker was just following the rules, so would the miners if they decide to fork. Bitcoin works the same way, if over 50% of the miners decide to take your bitcoins away from you they can. It is just how it works.

"The Attacker" responds: http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/dao-attacker-says-3m-ether-loss-is-legal/

Yes, there is nothing more important than bread and circuses. This has always been the case. Democracy is not necessarily an optimal system anyway. When people learn that they can simply vote themselves more bread and circuses it eventually will collapse. If you had to have a government, a benevolent dictator would probably be the best you could hope for. The problem with that is that even benevolent people once given unlimited power don't remain benevolent dictators for long. And even if you could find such a saint how would you ever find another after (s)he's gone? There is really no stable form of government.

Ethereum can execute turing complete smart contracts directly with an easy to use programming language, the bitcoin blockchain can not. I agree with you about XMR I don't like the openness of XBT or ETH. A ethereum like blockchain without the ability to publically see who owns what or is party to which contracts would be the ultimate, but I don't think it exists yet.

Well that was a short lived experiment that crashed pretty quickly. Long story short: The DAO was hacked and funds stolen. Now they are going to attempt to hard fork the Ethereum blockchain to take the funds back from the thieves and allow everyone who invested in the DAO to get their either back.

+1 Additionally, how do we screen people for affiliation with terrorism? Who the hell is going to admit that they are with ISIS? Rather, the opposite happens. The 9/11 hijackers kept shaved beards, short hair, and partied at strip clubs in order to blend in. Finally, none of this does anything to stop homegrown terrorists. The Orlando guy was born in Queens to Afghan parents who immigrated 30 years ago! Call me crazy, but you could stop lobbing bombs all over the world ... for a start. +1 Our foreign policy has created an entire generation that hates America - not because we have freedom, but because we viewed as acceptable to kill tens of thousands of innocent people as collateral damage for our true goals in the area. They hate us because we can bomb a Doctors Without Borders facility and kill innocent patients and doctors to get at a single suspected target. They hate us because we pretend they're sovereign nations until they do something we don't like and then we strip them of their sovereignty. They hate us because economic development in that part of the globe has moved backwards for the past two or three decades because we've chosen a state of constant war as part of our foreign policy. They hate us because we arm and train rebels to fight U.S. funded/placed/supported dictators and then they turn those weapons on the people in the name of ISIS. Yea - I'd hate us too. I agree. When discussing protection from acts of violence, it is much easier to protect against violence when there aren't a lot of people who want to kill you. Once you have a lot of people who want you dead, the whole problem of what to do about stopping violence gets a few orders of magnitude more difficult. There aren't a whole lot of people in Switzerland or Iceland worried about these things right now.

+1 Additionally, how do we screen people for affiliation with terrorism? Who the hell is going to admit that they are with ISIS? Rather, the opposite happens. The 9/11 hijackers kept shaved beards, short hair, and partied at strip clubs in order to blend in. Finally, none of this does anything to stop homegrown terrorists. The Orlando guy was born in Queens to Afghan parents who immigrated 30 years ago! Call me crazy, but you could stop lobbing bombs all over the world ... for a start.

Suicide rates with firearms have a fatality rate of 85% (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-fatality/), far in excess of fatality rates by other means. The total suicide fatality rate of all methods is 9%. Let's say that in total, banning firearm would conservatively save 33% of the firearm deaths in the US, so 10,000 people each year. For comparison purposes, the number of Americans that died in the Vietnam war was 58,000. One would have to assign a huge likelihood of mass murder by the US government in order to come close to offsetting the lives saved. For example, it would take a 5% chance each year that 200,000 are killed in some statist dystopia to get an expected lives saved that would offset the deaths prevented by eliminating firearms. Country by country suicide rates do not correlate at all with gun ownership rates. There is no evidence what so ever that lives would be saved in the suicide category with the removal of guns from society. In Japan the suicide rate is significantly higher than the US even though the suicide by gun rate is almost zero. I personally have known a few people who have committed suicide all three successful, none of which used guns as the method. My wife has a family member who has attempted suicide probably 30 times since she was a teenager (she's in her 50's now) and every time the methodology is the same. 1) Take a bunch of pills. 2) Call everyone she knows "just to say goodbye". 3) Ambulance comes and she gets her stomach pumped. Many non-gun suicides are "unsuccessful" simply because the "victim" didn't really want to die. Many "suicide attempts" are really about screaming for help or attention. People who use guns however are usually those who mean it. It is the difference between those who slit their wrists sideways and those who rip open up the vein and bleed out quickly. Some people mean it, and others don't. There are plenty of ways to kill yourself if you really have a mind to, from hanging, to high buildings, to drugs (without making goodbye calls), to suicide by cop, etc. People in Japan and other countries with high suicide rates and low gun ownership rates manage to figure out how to do it, I'm sure Americans could as well.

Designated driver should also be the designated carrier. I've been to and carried in such places (clubs, not gay bars :), not that there is anything wrong with that). I don't know if you've ever carried a firearm, but it changes the way you behave completely. I am less likely to blow the horn on my car when driving, I notice that I keep more of a distance between my car and the car in front of me and more likely to let everyone else go at intersections and such. I am much more likely to avoid even the most egregious antagonization from someone who's had too much to drink, and I never drink at all myself. Carrying a firearm is an enormous responsibility and the vast majority of people treat it as such. If you ever use your firearm every action you take in the moment and every action which preceded it, and every action you take after it will be endlessly gone over by the police, prosecutors (and if all goes wrong, a jury) after the fact with plenty of time to analyze and re-analyze every thing you said and did. If you've never carried and you start carrying you will even shock yourself at the effect it has on your actions and level of aggressiveness. You think about everything you do and say. You try to reduce the chance of any confrontation at all, however minor, to zero. In short you behave as civilized people should behave anyway, but don't always. An armed society is a polite society.

This is exactly right. America has decided having tens of thousands of innocents die every year is worth it in order to continue to own guns. It's a reasonable decision--even in America the odds of you or someone else killing your kids with a gun is pretty low. So, if you really like guns, there's far less than a 1% chance of your kid being the one that gets sacrificed so you can keep your toys. I wouldn't make that trade-off because I like to reduce even the small chance of my kids suffering a bloody death, but I can see why others would decide it's worth the risk. The analysis isn't between thousands of dying and 0 dying to have guns. The data suggests that taking away firearms reduces gun-related violence, but violence overall increases. So the real evaluation would be the thousands that die every year from guns relative to how much of an increase in those who will be killed by other means once guns are banned and whether the other things given up by giving up guns is worth that sacrifice. "Freedom isn't free" applies to more than simply the military men we send over seas to die, but this is the evaluation that must occur to determine if getting rid of them is "worth it". Obviously, people will come to different conclusions. LOL, do you actually believe this? That if the government went all tyrannical (heck, rkbabang might think they already are) guns will provide the means to stop them? Has there been a single time in the last 50 years where a bunch of Americans with guns decided to fight the US government and won? (Or is this more of a "this is a cool quote, so I don't really care if it actually would work in real life" thing.) Show me a time when the gov't went all tyrannical in the past 50 years, or does your time frame totally miss the comparison? The last time we had a tyrannical government that tried something that a large number of people disagreed with and were willing to die for was the Revolutionary War - and you can be damn sure guns made a difference. There are ~310M Americans and ~380M privately owned firearms. The government could not put down a large scale rebellion short of using its nuclear arsenal. And if it is willing to do that, no one wins. But I am more concerned about crime than fighting off government. I am much more likely to be attacked by a private criminal at some point in my life than I am to be involved in a revolutionary uprising. And the need for a revolutionary uprising is a lot less likely if there are hundreds of millions of guns in private hands as there are now. The largest problem America has with its guns is that most of them are sitting unloaded at home in their owners gun safes where they do no one any good. The problem isn't that there were too many guns at that club this weekend, the problem is that there were far too few. When your life is in danger, your gun at home in your safe is as useless to you as if you didn't own it. What needs to happen is to get people to carry and remove the legal and cultural barriers which are stopping them.

I kind of like the hyperloop tech for intercity traveling at much greater speed than 150mpg (600-700 mph) in evacuated tunnels and drones for intracity short distance travel. This would leave airports for intercontinental travel only, at least until they put hyperloop tunnels under the oceans. I was pretty sure I'd get a hyperloop reply, which I think will be awesome technology if they can figure out the little things like how to actually build a viable working model. I'm not sure whether it would be lower cost than rail, it would seem to be a faster more expensive way to travel. Well worth it over longer or heavily traffic distances. I don't see it totally replacing rail for many things like transporting high volume low cost goods like coal or agricultural products or large/heavy equipment. I was just having fun with my thought experiment mixing drones and fast moving trains, you've now expanded it to include uber-fast trains. I thank you for that. The Hyperloop will now form the arteries of my transportation system, along with High speed rail as the vessels, and drones as the capillaries. You take the Hyperloop to go from LA to NY or maybe just from New York to New Jersey. You ride a drone from your house to hitch a ride on the high speed light rail to get to work. I'll buy that. And to get to the other side of the planet you hop on a suborbital space craft and get to anywhere on Earth in under 2 hours.