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And this proves the dollar has no value and is "theirs, not yours"... how? Sure seems like you're just blaming every problem you can think of on the nearest scapegoat.

You, on the other hand, fail to see and/or accept that the problems you complain about were actually much worse before that system came into being. Kind of like insisting that since Vioxx caused heart attacks, modern medicine is a sham and we should go back to spells and bleeding.

"...it's much more comforting to tell yourself everyone who disagrees with you is uneducated, trolling, or an enemy agent than to face the possibility that you're wrong."

Thanks for proving my point!

Likewise, it's much easier for credulous fanatics to cite half a dozen articles from conspiracy-theorist web sites than to argue against hundreds of articles, books, speeches, etc. saying something else from hundreds of different perspectives, over a range of decades, gathered from real life. And it's much more comforting to tell yourself everyone who disagrees with you is uneducated, trolling, or an enemy agent than to face the possibility that you're wrong.

So, in other words, you have no answer? You said those dollars are "theirs, not yours"... except you never actually have to give them back. You can spend them, giving them to someone else, and they don't have to give them back to the Federal Reserve either. "If it does not return to the Fed before you die, it's collected afterwards"... over a period of decades or centuries, as they change hands over and over and over and a fraction of them are paid in taxes each time (just like they would be if they were backed by gold).

Don't you think it's a little dishonest to throw around loaded phrases like "borrowed money" and "theirs, not yours" when the actual meaning you have in mind is so tame?

It's collected afterwards? When, and by whom?

If you're referring to taxes, doesn't that mean a gold-backed currency is also "borrowed money" since you still have to pay taxes with it?

Any idea why the pool has missed its chance to pay me on the last three blocks?

http://imgur.com/YBhX9.png

No deal. Maybe you ought to read bitrebel's posts again until you understand how the US dollar is worth no more than your mortgage. Worth less, in fact, because at least the mortgage is honest about being a debt. I'd be doing you a disservice by taking your mortgage instead of your dollars... and I just wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing I'd done that.

You know what? You're right, US dollars have no value, they're worthless. I can't believe I never realized that before but it's so obvious now that you've pulled the scales from my eyes. Thank you, sir!

As a token of my gratitude for enlightening me, I'm going to offer you a service for no charge: send me your worthless US dollars and I'll dispose of them for you. Oh, it'll be a heavy burden, but I'm willing to shoulder it for you, brother. Imagine the peace of mind you'll feel when you're free of all that debt!

Cool, I'd love to see what they do differently. Any besides Multipool?

I've patched this proxy to perform automatic pool hopping, directing requests to the most profitable pools, and have been using it successfully for several days on 3 proportional pools (very hoppable), 2 score-based (slightly hoppable), as well as PPS and solo mining as fallbacks. I don't have exact statistics on the earnings yet, but I believe it's over 20% more than I was making before.

I've only shared my patch with one friend, but I'm considering releasing it to the public for a bounty. Would anyone be interested?

That would make sense... so I guess "block estimate" is wavering up and down because my share of the pool is changing, which normally doesn't matter under PPS but does matter now that the total payout has exceeded 50 BTC?

What exactly do "current block estimate" and "maximum reward" mean in Artefact2's stats?

Sure, and in that case you wouldn't have been liable... but that's not what happened, so you are. If you think it's unfair to be blamed for causing an explosion that might have happened anyway, there's an easy way to avoid that: don't blow stuff up.

Adjusting damages based on wild speculation about what might have happened is just desperate wishful thinking.

Such proof would be impossible for anything like a client meeting or a job interview, of course: they're not basing their decision on a coin toss. I can only see this working in a narrow set of cases, involving something with a known probability structure that can't be replaced, like a ticket for a discontinued lottery.

If there were billions of people who interpreted colors differently, who didn't see some color differences we did and saw others we didn't, we could hardly call their perception "broken". At best we could call it different.

Likewise, it's awfully presumptuous to claim that you just happen to have perfect perception of rights when you're surrounded by people who perceive them differently. If anyone's perception is broken, what makes you so sure it's not yours?

Yes, the right to do something is equivalent to the right not to have anyone stop you from doing it.

They're attempting to violate my property rights by carrying out an act that's intended to do so and has a high chance of succeeding. I've suffered no actual damages, but I think that's close enough to be considered a violation: I have the right not to be subject to serious attempts to violate my rights.

Well, I have a hard time imagining a real damage you could suffer that wouldn't involve damaging, moving, or rearranging the property. But I don't think I can object to this argument unless you're going to say that loss of potential revenue counts as a "real damage".

Let's do a simple substitution to illustrate how absurd this is.

"It cannot be the case that I have the right to swing a baseball bat in the park and you can still sue me if I do so and damage your face. If it's my right to swing a baseball bat in the park, it's your obligation to protect your body from a baseball bat."

Your right to swing a baseball bat is, of course, not absolute. In general you have the right to swing your bat, but my right not to have my face bashed in takes precedence. That places an implicit limit on your right to swing.

Likewise, in general you have the right to shine your flashlight, but my right not to have my property damaged takes precedence. That places an implicit limit on your right to shine it, but the limit doesn't have to be as broadly drawn as you've proposed: we don't have to ban you from shining the flashlight through all windows with no regard to what's on the other side.

Yes, rights do conflict, which is why we've come up with ways to resolve those conflicts.

Your right to drive your car in your driveway is not absolute. Suppose I'm standing in your driveway, with your permission, when suddenly you decide it's time to drive your car down the driveway. You run me over and I sue you. You'll quickly find that my right not to be run over takes precedence over your right to drive.

My right to have my fragile glass structure remain intact is not absolute either. Your right to drive in your driveway takes precedence, assuming reasonable circumstances (driving at a normal speed, in a vehicle that produces typical levels of vibration, with no malicious intent, etc.).

Because I'm not the one who damaged your house. Refusing to fix your house is different from knocking it down. The culprit you're looking for might be an earthquake, a strong wind, or termites, but it isn't me or anyone else who simply declined to take action to stop an event they had no preexisting obligation to stop.

No, I'm addressing it by pointing out that you're misinterpreting the events in the hypothetical. There was physical damage to the car: you rearranged its parts against my wishes. It wasn't permanent, but if it caused me to miss the meeting, then it must have taken some time to repair, and that time is the only tangible damage I've suffered.

If you believe there's some way your sabotage could have caused me to miss the meeting without costing me any time, would you mind spelling it out? I don't see how I can respond to the hypothetical if there's important context missing.

My right to control the configuration of my property includes keeping you out of my house, just like it includes keeping your paint off of my Rembrandt. Again, this derives from the nature of physical space: the house can't contain everyone and everything all at once, so someone has to decide what goes inside, and that person is the owner. Same goes for the museum.

Are you saying you're entitled to ruin all my film unless I agree to outlaw shining flashlights through windows?

What's the purpose of this Rube Goldberg system of rights and wrongs? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to say that what happens to me and my property as a result of your act is what determines whether I've been wronged?

I beg to differ. If what you call "property rights" don't even fulfill the basic requirement of stopping someone else from breaking my stuff, then they're so watered down as to be worthless.

Sometimes one person's rights conflict with another person's rights, but we don't need to demolish those rights in order to resolve the conflict.

A meeting with a potential client has no tangible value, even if I wish to have his money and I'm "near certain" my wish will come true. It's not mine yet.

That doesn't mean there's no damage from your act, though. Clearly reconnecting the wire cost something, otherwise I would've reconnected it in zero seconds and gotten to the meeting on time. It cost me the time it took to diagnose the problem and reconnect the wire, and we can assign a value to that time.

That's quite an interesting concept of property rights you have there, but it bears no relation to mine.

I say it matters because my property right is the right to keep my property in the place and the configuration I prefer (provided I have the right to occupy that place). Plain and simple, no weaselly subtleties. It's not about the value or even the utility of my property: it's about the physical matter it's made of, and my control over where it's located and how it's arranged.

That concept of property derives from the nature of physical matter, which is only able to be in one place at a time. You can't drive my car to New York at the same time I want to drive it to Los Angeles. You can't blow it up while I keep it intact. It's one or the other, so we need some means to decide who gets their way. Our society has chosen to do that by assigning an owner to the car and letting the owner decide where it will be. Since I'm the owner, you're violating my property rights if you move or alter the car against my will; the damages I suffer are approximately equal to the cost of restoring it to the way I want it.

This seems circular. How do we know whether an act is "wrongful" without knowing whether it violates rights?

If this is true, and no one else has been using your computer, you may be infected with a keylogger that has given an attacker your password. Log in on a different computer and change it from there, and don't log in on your first computer (to any site that matters!) until you've cleaned it up.

You say that as though the car itself doesn't matter! First I had a car, then you blew it up, and now I have no car. All I have is a pile of shards that I can't drive to work. Those are tangible damages.

This seems both unnecessary and a little too convenient. Harming me is a wrongful act in itself - it's wrong to harm people, isn't it? If diminishing the resale value of my property is a legitimate, actionable harm, how can you say no wrongful act has taken place when you do it?

In that case you'd use the replacement cost, unless you can make a convincing argument that a replacement is insufficient.

Correct, but you have to be careful not to include phony, wishful damages in that sum.

Market value is right, but I'd say it's not the value of the house that matters - it's the cost of restoring it to its original state. Cleaning up a footprint takes a few minutes; you could hire someone to do it for well under $100. Rebuilding a house takes months of effort and tons of material; it'll cost you tens of thousands of dollars to restore it, plus the cost of renting another home in the meantime. Those are the damages.