touchofevil

Yes, this is an unfortunate situation. Basically before the ICO happened a Swiss non-profit was formed called the Tezos foundation. The foundation would receive the ICO "donations" and then the foundation "may" provide the donors with Tezos coins when Tezos launches. I think this whole setting up a Swiss non-profit is just to get around the know-your-customer laws in the USA and also to avoid the SEC's rules about selling securities to unaccredited investors.

So now the Tezos foundation controls the ICO funds, which are now valued somewhere around $500 million, and according the Tezos founders one of the board members (Gevers [3]) has gone rogue and tried to grant himself a bonus that the founders say is not warranted.

What I've always found strange is that the other two board members of the Tezos foundation have never really been discussed publicly in any way. One of them is Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons [1] and the other appears to be a company formation agent, Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher [2]. I've been unable to find out how these other two board members were selected, which is a bit odd considering the fate of about $500 million and perhaps Tezos in general hangs in the balance of how these two people vote. Gevers formed the "crypto valley" in Switzerland, so I can understand he would be on the board, but I'm still not clear on how the non-profit was formed and the first place and how the board members were selected.

Here's a thread asking who is running the Tezos Foundation. https://forums.tezos.community/t/who-is-running-the-tezos-fo...

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/diego-olivier-fernandez-pons/ [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/guidos1/ [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanngevers/

Edit: This whole situation actually proves Tezos' point to me: that a cryptocurrency should not be controlled by a small group of individuals. In this case, the small group (the foundation) doesn't control the cryptocurrency, _just_ the ICO funds.

This is why I'm really interested in Tezos. The promise of Tezos is that the governance will happen on the Tezos blockchain via voting by holders of Tezos. Decred is also doing something similar, but I don't think Decred has smart contracts, whereas Tezos will.

Here's a recent Tedx Talk by the CTO of Tezos. https://youtu.be/SbaVNkyGT3M

PS. I did not contribute to the Tezos ICO and I don't hold any Decred.

Finally! I've been really impressed with the Microsoft Hololens and I was hoping to see more action in the AR headset arena. This is a great move in my opinion!

It seems like the root problem is that students cannot declare bankruptcy on student loans. If they could do that then lenders would adjust for risk accordingly which would lower the availability of loans, which would in turn drive tuition down. I know there's an argument that students will just declare bankruptcy after graduating, but if that's the case then the solution would be to make bankruptcy less appealing via disincentives (more penalties for declaring bankruptcy).

Making student loans exempt from bankruptcy is distorting the loan markets and, in turn, tuition. If restricting the availability of loans creates a situation in which the higher education is unavailable to students without financial means, then the state should make free or very low cost higher education available to offset this. The solutions are so obvious that it's pretty clear that the financing of student loans is a giant con at this point.

It seems wrong to categorize the war in Iraq as part of The War on Terror(ism), since Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11. The best explanation I ever found as to why the US went to war in Iraq was in the article below. It basically says that the Neoconservative faction of the right wanted to bring democracy to the middle east long before 9/11, but 9/11 was their opportunity to actually do it. Here's an excerpt:

"Neoconservatism, which had been around for decades, mixed humanitarian impulses with an almost messianic faith in the transformative virtue of American military force, as well as a deep fear of an outside world seen as threatening and morally compromised.

This ideology stated that authoritarian states were inherently destabilizing and dangerous; that it was both a moral good and a strategic necessity for America to replace those dictatorships with democracy — and to dominate the world as the unquestioned moral and military leader.

Neoconservatism's proponents, for strategic as well as political reasons, would develop an obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That obsession would, by the end of the decade, congeal into a policy, explicitly stated: regime change.

Their case was always grandly ideological, rooted in highly abstract and untested theories about the nature of the world and America's rightful place in it. Their beliefs were so deeply held that when 9/11 shook the foundations of American foreign policy, they were able to see only validation of their worldview, including their belief in the urgent need to bring democracy to Iraq.

It was this ideological conviction, more than any piece of intelligence or lie told about it, that primarily led America into Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction were the stated justification, but they were never the real reason, nor was bad intelligence."

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/11022104/iraq-war-neoconservat...

Would it be possible for your team to start a small VC firm instead of a startup? Wouldn't that be a better fit for a team that has lots of capital, one technical partner, and one sales partner, but currently doesn't have an idea?

The ICO funds are controlled by a Swiss foundation. See my other comment in this thread regarding the board members of the Swiss foundation.

I think you are incorrect about how much the Breitman's would make from the ICO. The Breitman's company DLS would get 8.5% of the ICO funds once the main net launches and then their company would also get 10% of the genesis block, but that vests over four years.

So 8.5% of $232 million would be about $20 million and it's hard to say what 10% of the genesis block would be worth over the course vesting. Below are the details about the payments to the Breitmans.

https://www.tezos.com/dls

Payment Structure and Contrast to Common fundraising practices It has become common in fundraisers, or in token generation events (TGEs) for founders of entities selling tokens to reward themselves, in addition to their token allocation, via salaries with little or no accountability and oversight and in a manner that doesn’t reflect the viability of their product.

In contrast, payments to DLS are contractually prescribed via the following criteria, which are being shared publicly and in advance of the fundraiser:

No payment will be made unless and until the terms in the preceding section of this document have been met. Once met, DLS’ shareholders will receive 8.5% of the contributions made during the fundraiser. In addition, DLS’ shareholders will receive a 10% allocation of the tokens in the genesis block, placed in a smart contract that will vest monthly over a period of 48 months. These criteria represent a far more transparent and equitable reflection of the reality of the transaction.

After the ICO, I started trying to figure out who was on the board of the Tezos Foundation. I found it strange that there was very little info about who was on a three person board that controls hundreds of millions of dollars. What I found was that one person seems to be a company formation agent, Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher. Another is, Gevers, who is now being accused of self-dealing by Arthur Breitman. And the third is a virtually unknown software engineer named Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons.

I'm assuming that Diego Pons is a friend of Arthur's because they are both from France and both lived in NYC. I also have a hunch that there is a secret agreement in writing in place that compels Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher to vote according to someone else's wishes, perhaps Mr. Pons. If there is such an agreement in place, hopefully Mr. Pons is staying loyal to Arthur Breitman.

Handing over 200-400 Million to a three person foundation that is 1/3 company formation agent, 1/3 alleged crook, and 1/3 random software engineer seems like it may not have been the best idea after all. But the reason for this is probably to take advantage of the lack of know your customer laws in Switzerland.

https://forums.tezos.community/t/who-is-running-the-tezos-fo...

Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do. Basic Income is meant as a "floor" that those people will not be able to fall below.

The courses at RealPython.com look good.

The Bitcoin bubble could still be the result of government action even though Bitcoin is not a creature of government. For example, if China is preventing its citizens from moving money offshore that action could result in a Bitcoin bubble as Chinese citizens use Bitcoin to work around government restrictions. Now that China is clamping down, the bubble (if there is one) could pop.

The same thing has happened with Chinese buyers driving up the price of random short domain names.

https://qz.com/581248/chinas-latest-investment-craze-is-shor...

Completely agree. Future generations will marvel at the fact that we didn't figure out that having large populations living in poverty would create hot zones for contagious disease to spread from. The Ebola outbreak that showed up in Dallas a few years ago comes to mind. Poverty needs to be eliminated worldwide ASAP to prevent the next pandemic.

Why doesn't Youtube have a few formally trained filmmakers or film theorists on staff that they can kick these sorts of edge cases up to? Someone with a filmmaking or film theory education would instantly classify this short as art that should be available on Youtube. I could see this video being given an age restriction, but never banned.

I can't recommend varidesk.com or geekdesk.com enough. A varidesk is great if your company already supplies you with a non-standing desk and a geekdesk is excellent if you work from home and get to pick any desk you want. Be sure to get a mat to stand on as well.

I'm interested in getting into Hololens development. What languages, frameworks and tools would you recommend? From what I've read it seems like I'd be using Unity and C#.

You might find this article written by a dying advertising creative director interesting. I certainly did. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/overdue-lesson-perspective-li...

You're right though, my last paragraph is not really needed for the argument. It would be better to say that the workday should just be four hours for everyone and companies can pay for overtime as needed when crunch hits. That would apply to SpaceX the same as it would to an ad agency.

I worked in film and I found it sad how many people are working 12 hour days to help create garbage movies that are just a cash grab by studios. Those kinds of hours really take a toll. It's one thing to do those kinds of hours if you are making something you think is really great art (it's still rough) but it's another thing to be making those sacrifices to help create a totally disposable movie meant only to enrich a studio.

I was working in visual effects where we were doing 9 to 11 hours per day of work at a desk. Nearly everyone ending up buying their own varidesk (varidesk.com) I can't recommend them highly enough, especially if you work at an office where you are provided a regular desk. Varidesks just sit on top of your regular desk. I liked using a standing desk so much, I bought a Geek Desk for home use. geekdesk.com If you get one, be sure to get a standing desk floor mat as well.

I'm completely over the 8 hour plus 1 hour lunch workday that results in spending 9 hours at or around your place of employment. When you factor in your commute of, say, 30 min each way, you've just spent 10 hours of your day.

Add 8 hours sleep plus 1 hour for dinner plus 1 hour getting up and ready in the morning, that leaves you with 4 hours for your life during the weekdays. Then you watch an hour of TV with your significant other, now you've got 3 hours left. It gets pretty hard to pursue a side project, art, or a hobby living like that. Can you cut an hour or two off sleep? Maybe, but I didn't factor in things like working out or calling your friends/family so it's probably a wash.

What's more is that the lifestyle I've described above doesn't leave people with much time to consume products/services. If people had shorter workdays they would actually have time to spend money, which you'd think capitalism would want most of all. Cutting down the workday would save people so many pointless meetings as well since managers might actually feel some sort of constraint on the time they have their employees in their offices.

I think most people in tech or high-skilled white collar jobs see how their fellow employees do various things to reduce the 40 hour workweek to something reasonable. People work from home one day a week often, or they work four days a week supposedly doing 10 hour days instead of 8. There's a lot of charade involved in the 40 hour week for many employees. However, many other employees aren't able to find these loopholes and it results in a real grind...especially when the job isn't just 40 hours a week and turns into 50 or 60, which quickly becomes unbearable.

We've really got to stop this madness. If you work at SpaceX or Blue Origin, then yeah, what you're doing is pretty important and you might actually save the human race, so you can feel good about those 40 hours. But if you're working at an ad agency making gum commercials, let's get real, it could and should be done in 4 hours a day. And besides, SpaceX and Blue Origin can double their staff if needed to offset the shorter hours. Since their employees would be better rested and happier they probably won't even need 2x their staff, maybe just 1.5x.

If you like this, you should have a look at tig.ht

http://tig.ht/

You could consider Silicon Beach (Los Angeles) instead. Rents are cheaper and google and snapchat are located there.

The best thing to do is probably to buy an NAS, seed it with your 17TB of files and then colocation it at a colo facility or a friend's house and then use some sort of one way sync utility (rsync, rclone, carbon copy cloner, bittorrent sync, etc) to update the remote NAS as you add/delete files to the source.

I think you should take their offer based on: 1) You were already prepared to pivot 2) You said this company is going to enter your market and would be hard to compete against 3) They are offering you "great jobs" 4) Your health/finances sound like they could use a chance to recover. Seems like a good outcome for 18 months of hard work.

I've really enjoyed these videos, so thank you! If I might make one suggestion, in addition to (or instead of) the wireless lavalier microphones that the guests wear, could you also set up some microphones on tables in front of the guests? That way, in post, your video editor could choose whether they want to use the lavalier microphone audio or the microphone on the desk audio. Ms. Lee's microphone is picking up a lot of rustling from her hair touching the microphone and it makes the audio hard to listen to. Microphones on a table in front of your guests would have avoided this problem. A wireless lavalier mic makes sense if your guest is lecturing and walking around, but for two seated guests microphones on tables would probably be better or at least a good addition to your setup.

Do these companies that keep offering unlimited plans not know about reddit.com/r/datahoarder? I feel like the users of that subreddit alone will crush pretty much any cloud service offering unlimited storage plans.

The UsedSoft v Oracle case is specifically about and whether or not a licensee can resell the software they have purchased.

"On 3 July 2012, the ECJ handed down its landmark decision in UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle International Corp (C-128/11), ruling that the owner of copyright in software cannot prevent a perpetual licensee who has downloaded the software from the internet from selling his ‘used’ licence. This decision has significant implications for the software and other digital industries." [1]

[1] http://www.linklaters.com/Insights/Publication1403Newsletter...

I think for software companies to comply with the EU ruling they would need to have a mechanism for transferring registration keys from one user to another. After the original buyer transfers their key to a buyer on the secondary market, the original buyer would no longer have access to the software.

It's been awhile since I read that Oracle v UsedSoft ruling, but I think that the new owner is entitled to whatever updates are offered. If they were paid updates, (like upgrading from v7 to v8 for $20) the new owner would still have to pay the upgrade fee, of course. But if they were free updates, then they would be free to new owner just as they would be to the original owner.

From a software seller's perspective, I don't see the issue with this. If you sell one license of your software to a user, you have accepted that one user will consume one license of your software. If that license gets transferred to a different user then the original user has relinquished their license, which has resulted, still, in only one license getting consumed by one user. When you sold the software you committed to updating that one license of software that you sold, what does it matter who is using and getting the update for that single license? (Of course you don't have to give free updates to any users whether they bought your software on the secondary market or directly from the software developer.)

If you look at ProTools, they actually let user transfer licenses between each other. The licenses are stored on an iLok and users can transfer keys between one another. It's great because users can sell used audio plugins for protools or the actual protools software itself to each other. https://www.ilok.com/#!home

I think that this is the big question! I actually started an auction site based on allowing EU users to resell their Steam games (and ios/google play apps) b/c I think due to the Oracle v UsedSoft ruling Steam users should be able to resell their Steam game keys. However, b/c there is no mechanism to transfer keys (or ios apps) between users, there wasn't much my startup could do.

There was an attempt in Germany to sue Steam to allow users to resell their entire Steam account(1). However, that effort failed. I think they should have pursued a case that focused on allowing Steam users to resell individual games. There may still be a court case that could be won that focuses on reselling the individual games keys between users.

I think in the EU though there could be some debate about whether games are considered "software". Only software is covered by Oracle v UsedSoft as I recall.

(1) https://theundisciplined.com/2014/03/20/losing-steam-is-used...

I'm also curious about reselling in-app purchases. The Oracle vs UsedSoft ruling only applied to "software" as I recall. I think if you had paid for in-app purchases to unlock premium features of a product there could be a case to made that you should be able to resell that free app with the features you paid to unlock.

As far as reselling unused in-game currency like gold coins that speed up construction of a building, I personally think it would be cool to see a secondary market pop up. However, I don't know if that would be covered by UsedSoft v Oracle.

The big question is whether individual Steam games should be able to be resold in the EU due to Oracle vs UsedSoft. If so, that's a potential multi-billion dollar secondary market that doesn't exist yet.

Edit: Sidenote, I actually started an auction site based on the idea of reselling Steam games (and ios games) several years ago based on the UsedSoft v Oracle ruling but due to these companies not allowing users to transfer licenses between each other, my startup was not workable.

The whole "lifetime license in exchange for a one-time fee" idea in the Oracle vs UsedSoft case comes from that case trying to determine what "ownership" means in regards to digital products. In Autodesk vs Vernor, Autodesk was claiming that if you paid $3,000 for license of Autocad, you don't actually own that software you are just "licensing" it and thus the first sale doctrine doesn't apply, so the customer can't resell the Autocad product they bought, even though the customer paid a one-time fee for a product they "own" for life (this was before Autodesk moved to a subscription model). Autodesk claimed this b/c they included in their EULA that the customer was merely licensing their product and didn't "own" it. The US supreme court eventually agreed with Autodesk.

In the Oracle vs UsedSoft case, the EU court was taking on this question of what does it mean to "own" a digital product vs "licensing" a digital product. That court came to the conclusion that if you paid a one-time fee for a lifetime license of a digital product then you own that product (no matter what the EULA says) and the first sale doctrine applies, which gives you the right to resell it. On the other hand, if you were paying a fee that only gives you access for a set amount of time (a subscription), then you would just be renting (or "licensing") that product for a certain amount of time and thus wouldn't own it, which means you can't resell that product because it isn't covered by the first sale doctrine.

A subscription expires and would need to be renewed. Your license for FCPX never expires. Since you paid a one-time fee for a license of FCPX that never expires (a lifetime license) your copy of FCPX would be covered Oracle vs UsedSoft in the EU and you could resell it. Paying a one-time fee for something is not a subscription.

If you buy a car with cash, you own that car. You can own/use that car for the rest of your life or you can resell that car. If you lease a car you have a subscription that you must renew to keep using that car and you do not have the right to resell that car. That is basically how the Oracle vs UsedSoft sees software products in the EU.