Sambdala

However, there is a ton of friction in the hiring and firing process (from an anecdotal point of view), and it intuitively seems like the kind of friction that is more easily handled by a larger company rather than a startup.

If they don't require you to keep clicking a button to "request content", it doesn't count as an on-demand service.

When the airport is outside town, and you have to arrive 1.5 hours before the flight takes off, taking even a large % of the flight time off doesn't make a significant dent in total travel time.

Given the recent spat of insolvent Bitcoin sites, I whipped together a project that will allow any site that holds customer Crypto Currency funds to verify to all customers and the public that they're solvent.

It also allows anyone to host a third-party verification site (work in progress) that will let someone copy/paste some JSON and then explain to the end-user whether they should trust the site they're using and why.

There's a Python and JS implementation, and I'd like to add more languages. I also need to finish the web verification and make sure everything is explained clearly.

However, this offer was rejected, and instead PokerStars paid the amount of the balances (I'm not sure about any fees, etc), and then the players needed to wait until now to receive payment.

Rest of world customers of Full Tilt were able to receive payment from PokerStars long before now.

Edit: For transparency's sake, I do work for PokerStars, I don't speak for them, and I wasn't directly involved with any of the US/DOJ stuff.

I'll flesh it out a bit better tomorrow.

My email is in my profile, and I'm happy to Skype chat with anyone who wants to help.

Maybe they are.

If you can use a ssh client:

Then someone will probably make a billion dollar company understanding why that's an out of touch response.

The storage nodes also have no knowledge of who owns the file or what the contents are. Combined with the fact that they'd immediately stop getting paid for the other files they're hosting, it seems like the ROI for one of those evil nodes is pretty negative.

https://github.com/ConceptPending/fincrypt

Backups are verified at regular intervals to reduce the amount of trust needed in the system, and every file is stored multiple times.

Eventually the goal is to attach a marketplace where end users will pay for the space they use and those who provide storage will get paid for doing so.

+<p> If you are a registered user, you can access most information associated with your Account

However, there are still those purposes for which that's not a good idea...

I'm most of the way through the non-Bitcoin / "Disk Space Marketplace" portion of a project that would work really well for this[1].

While the premise is that you would be able to rent disk space from anyone who wanted to provide it (using Bitcoin/Stripe/PayPal/Whatever), that part is going to be decoupled from the actual encrypt + distribute portion which could be pretty easily used by a group of friends to have reciprocal backups of important data.

I'm still a couple weekends away from it being usable though.

[1] https://github.com/ConceptPending/fincrypt

A "go bag"? You mean a packed suitcase?

Okay, so given the trend of these powers is to increase, and he's not going to be in power after 2016, does he trust the next guy with even more powers, or the guy after that with even more than that?

When civil liberties advocates visited to press him to do more to reverse Mr. Bush’s policies, Mr. Obama pushed back. “He reminded me that he had a different role to play, that he was commander in chief and that he needed to protect the American people,”

The role of President isn't to follow through on the platform you were elected on?

Finland has UHC don't they? My point is basically that the funding mechanism doesn't (at this moment) seem to have anything to do with what service you receive.

"Exactly."

I would pay ridiculous amounts of money for an Uber for healthcare. As long as I didn't have to be put on hold while I was trying to do so.

I don't take nearly advantage of what I should in the healthcare realm because I have to make a phone call, take time off work, make transportation arrangements, and then know I'm going to be subject to something annoying somewhere in the process. If I could press a button, see what appointments are available, and then know it would be annoyance-free once I arrived, I'd probably use my available healthcare a much more appropriate amount.

"They say that the difference between a Libertarian and an Anarchist is roughly six months (paraphrased)."

Yeah, I think that's about right. I think I passed that mark maybe four years ago?

edit: I also went from dirt-poor (and I'm assuming really horrible) health insurance plans in the US to having ridiculously good private insurance in the UK, so I'm already aware I'm entering into a supremely Apples v. Oranges scenario as is.

I've lived in both the US and the UK (well, the Isle of Man; I've heard NHS is much more of a pain in the ass in the mainland UK), and I'm just shocked at how awful the customer service has always been in the US.

In the US, I have never arrived at a doctor's appointment without waiting far past the time the appointment was scheduled to start and then waiting for the GP to actually come to the appointment room once you're seated there. In the UK (so far), I've seen the estimated time left before my appointment on an LED screen, and then both been led to the room on time and had the GP come in almost immediately.

In every aspect of healthcare in the US, I've been shocked at how long you're just expected to wait for absolutely everything.

Even if you arrive early, you sign in, wait in a room full of sick people for (on average IME) 40+ minutes past your appointment time, and then you wait an additional 15+ minutes for the GP to actually come into the room to begin the appointment.

It actually makes me physically angry to think about how much time I've spent waiting in a doctor's room over the first 20-something years of my life.

In your scenario B), I'd expect to be able to book an appointment online, arrive two minutes before it's scheduled to start, and walk out fifteen minutes later with whatever result you were looking for 99% of the time.

To be fair, I've visited my general practitioner exactly twice since I've moved here, so I have no sample size; and as I previously stated, I live in an area that has a reputation for having much better healthcare than the mainland UK.

I'm mostly talking about the US, although I've since moved to the UK, but I still do most of my driving when I come back to visit the US.

As a point of reference, I'm most familiar with Chicago/Illinois & St. Louis/Missouri speed limits, and I think Illinois speed limits tend to be set unreasonably low (lower than almost anyone on the road is actually driving), while Missouri speed limits are generally more reasonable, if a little cautious.

"You think 25 mph on a residential street is too low? There's a British video of how even low-speed collisions can be fatal for pedestrians."

And places where pedestrians are regularly crossing the middle of the street are perfect spots to implement Traffic Calming, and to be honest, 99% of my complaint is regarding non-residential streets.

"25 mph: residental, 30 mph on undivided business streets, 40/45 for multilane main streets. 50 mph for minor highways, and 65+ for interstates and major highways."

I would say this is generally what they are set to in St. Louis, but they're systemically 5 to 10 MPH lower in Chicago and most of the surrounding suburbs.

Missouri has recently also instituted variable speed limits that change based on weather and time of day. This to me speaks mountains about the true intention being closer to safety than either revenue or giving cops the ability to pull basically anyone over.

Whereas your argument is, the status quo is fine, people just need to follow the current rules better, even though all evidence says people aren't going to do so?

You're conflating all instances of speeding with "the idiot who drives 50mph on my street, which is 1/4 mile long, and has children under the age of 12 in all ten houses on this road."

Instead of being able to have a measured conversation about what speed is safe in a given street or area, we get hysterical fear mongering that does two things:

1. It causes the speed limit on a majority of roads to be set to a level that is well below a safe speed to drive, instead of setting reasonable limits in most places and then carving out exceptions in places that are more dangerous.

2. Your tone, both when talking about behavior you'd like to see changed and when referring to the other people whose comfort/time/opinion you "don't give a rats (sic) ass about", is alienating and all too common in these kind of conversations.

Both of these factors contribute to people, en mass, deciding speed limits (on their own) are never actually meaningful, and so they must use other factors to decide how quickly they should drive.

Maybe Traffic Calming should be implemented on your street, instead of posting a small sign that people will ignore?

In his initial post, Op didn't ask for 100% enforcement so that we would then get sane laws, he called for 100% enforcement because children are dying.

I do agree that full enforcement would likely lead to vey quick changes in the law.

I disagree vehemently.

People drive a speed they feel comfortable driving. Full Stop.

The only time a speed limit sign changes behavior in the vast majority of drivers (in the US anyway) is when a cop is present.

The smarter way to reduce speed in the sections of road that actually are more dangerous is to make them look more dangerous, for example by painting lines on the road that make you think you're travelling faster than you are.

There are major roads where, except for rush hour, 100% of cars on the road are travelling well above the speed limit because it is set far too low for a modern vehicle driving on a multi-lane, fairly straight highway.

This causes a fairly similar attitude toward speed limits that a large percentage of the population has toward pot: you scaremonger about something that obviously isn't dangerous in 95% of cases (pot / 35 MPH, 6 lane roads), which makes the remaining 5% of cases that are actually dangerous (Heroin / sharp turn with low visibility) seem less dangerous because you spent so much effort to conflate the two.

Meanwhile, we're unable to have a sober conversation about the subject that results in speed limits and road laws that make sense because of think of the children! scaremongering, e.g., "children on their way to school also lose the reverse lottery, but instead of a $300 fine, they die."

...Not that I think it's a bad thing if a bunch of Bitcoin transactions (especially microtransactions) go off the blockchain, I just wanted to point out that off-blockchain transactions weren't inherent to accepting Bitcoin through Coinbase.

This just means for Gold, you effectively have a Put option for a very small percentage of what it's currently trading at, instead of 0% of what it's trading at.