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Inflation is currently controlled by adjusting the amount of new money printed to back up loans given to large banks.

Instead of printing new money in this way, we could just give the new money directly to the citizens.

Quick napkin math shows that every person in the US would have gotten a check every year all the way back to the 30's (some years smaller than others), without needing to raise taxes at all. In fact cancelling some of the welfare programs made unnecessary by this system would likely result in lower taxes.

Loans would be more expensive, but more expensive loans seems like a small price to pay for basically ending homelessness and hunger.


If you go to http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/body.html# then you can get a little further, but it still complains about not having webGL enabled.


How much money have you made with these tactics? How much have you lost?


I am very angry about this. I was damned close to going live. My code was written. My backtesting showing amazing results.

Now every douchenozzle on earth will be onboard the bandwagon, and render it useless.

EVERY TIME I HAVE A GOOD IDEA SOMEONE BEATS ME TO IT! WHARBLEGLARBLE!


BTW - My 'Calmness Indicator' was simply the ratio of capital letters and exclamation marks to other text. It wasn't 87 percent, but close enough.

HULK SMASH! BAD SCIENTISTS! BAD!


Do you have any idea what you would have done after your project went live?

Because you can still beat them to that.


Yes. I do. I was going to bet on the supershort, and superlong funds. (2-4 x average market returns) for short term periods, and double my money every few days. I was only waiting to build capital.

Now I have zero time to build capital before it's leveraged away. FUDGE!

I am righteously pissed off now. I had investors on the hook. now it will all be arbitraged away from me.

It's just like quicksilverscreen when Rupert Murdoch litigated it away (one of the senators who voted for the DMCA was one of the lawyers defending Fox).

I am ANGRY.


what's to keep you from going live right now? credit's cheap. max out a credit card? trade on margin? you really have no access to capital? --or you do but you'd rather use someone elses? pivot?

i GUARANTEE you that people are already trading based on twitter data. i doubt you're really as bad off as you think.

..or maybe you are. yes. actually, your position is hopeless. might as well go open source with it now. sourceforge link pls?


I have so damned many phonecalls to make tomorrow. A lot of powerful, and wealthy people will never talk to me again because of this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity. Fuck.


You may be mad, but unfortunately this is not the place for it. Let us know if it pans out.


I just lost billions of potential dollars, because some college kid couldn't see the practical applications and published. What would your response be?

What if you were sleeping in someone else's garage, it was less than freezing temperature outside, someone had stolen your car a few weeks ago, and you had put your own kneecaps on the line as collateral? What would it be then?

Frankly, I think I'm holding together rather well given my circumstances.


Relax, dude, I've heard exactly this idea pitched by 2 other people, you'd have been up against "douchenozzles" even if this "douchenozzle" hadn't published.


I think this further illustrates the theory put forth that ideas are worthless, and it's only implementations that matter.


Your calmness index is pretty low right now. I wonder how this will affect the market.


The higher a monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail.

That said this article brought a tear to my eye.


I want to do web appliction penetration testing, or really any type of security work.

I've been doing it my entire life as a hobby, and since a recent Reddit post wherein I expressed my frustration at being listened to for bug reports I've gotten a couple of dialogs with companies started... So I may end up getting to.

Current job == Unemployed. I hate it. All I do all day is either look for work (of any kind that pays well enough to cover my child support) , or get frustrated and drink.


Only by introducing a delay where is none is needed.

This makes things slower for the rest of us. 1 extra millisecond per user * 8 billion users * times 10 logins a day == Lots Of Lost Man Hours, probably enough to rebuild the great pyramids of Egypt by hand every year.

Security researchers are the reason we can't have nice things. :)


The funniest part about these discussions is that we're discussing an optimization that exclusively helps attackers. Virtually all HMAC candidate hashes are correct all the way through the final byte, meaning that even in a classic short-circuited compare, you still have to read everything. In virtually all traffic, you never get to take that short circuit. The only time short-circuited comparisons ever make things faster is when an attacker is waiting for a rejection.


However, in many high-level languages == is written in C, and reimplementing it in the high-level language can be quite slow in comparison.


You know, it'd be handy if such high-level languages implemented a separate =$= operator that worked just like ==, but was timing-independent.


I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for months now.

If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way.

EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !"

I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.


Why did you follow that person?


I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't. The whole follow me, and I'll follow you thing is effective from a marketing point of view, which is why the place is filled with useless affiliate spam.

They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam.

Why can't I sort or filter any of my incoming tweets in any meaningful way? I can have favorites. I can make lists. I CAN'T just type in 'Fck', and stop my feed from showing me the tweets with the word 'Fck' in them.

I can search for tweets about 'Ruby On Rails', but I can't just add those people to a list called 'Ruby On Rails' without clicking each one of them... Several times.

To top it off their API is so limited that just retrieving a list of the people I'm following means I get blocked for an hour before I can do anything with it, and bypassing their silly API is against the TOS. So writing my own tool to filter properly is straight out.

I wanted to write a simple naive Bayesian filter app to separate the wheat from the chaff for me, but they make it damned near impossible to do so without being sued.


> I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't

In no way is that not your fault. None whatsoever.

I do agree that a filtering mechanism would be MUCH appreciated, however.


You are a coder, aren't you?

Let me restate it more precisely: The fact that my needs are not being met is their fault. The fact that I have those needs is mine.

My use case, and those of many others, requires the ability to 'follow' others and still filter their 'useful' postings from their 'non-useful' postings. This is 'my fault', in that I require more from the service than they are either willing or able to provide at this time.

Twitter has reduced my ability to use the service, in the way that I would most like to, by limiting their API and preventing screen scrapers from functioning in a legal and non-harmful way. None of this is any way my fault.

I still think my original phrasing was more concise, if not as explicit.


@DotSauce Agreed. I keep my account honed to my actual friends and a few other people. When people add me and are clearly not into tech or anything I tweet about, I block them. So far, I've stayed spam-free.


Do you have to block them, or is just not reciprocating the follow enough? I've been doing the latter and so far have no problems with spam.


I'm not sure if I have to, but I have the impression that these spammers look at other spammers' lists for potential new targets, so keeping myself off those lists is (in my mind) a good move. What's more, it sends a signal to the people at Twitter that this person is no good.

I do think, though, that not reciprocating is probably sufficient. I should've mentioned that I'm also a minimalist and like to keep my lists clean.


Got it thanks. Maybe I'll start blocking obvious spammers too.


You don't need to follow someone to get that stuff.

I have a pretty short twitter name and get @ed with garbage messages by random people.


I started/ran one. On a single box. Yeah. Seriously.

All it takes is content. Serious, good, content. Constantly.

QuickSilverScreen.com. It was top 100 (according to Alexa) for a month or so before I gave it away to a Swedish dude named Neels.

More people watched Lost on my website than on TV one week. I was proud.


When I did this same shit to Reddit a year ago (during the time they were doing it to Sears whilst crying 'I'm being oppressed!) they all called me an asshole.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9cvvp/why_it_was...

Now it's because everyone at Google sucks, and this is some unforgivable sin on the content providers behalf, not the jerk users who are exploiting it.

Fine internet. Have it both ways.... Sigh.


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