I learn things in my free time in order to beef up my skills for the next employer since the only way you can get a raise is to change jobs.
You do a job, you get paid to do that job. How's that job you're doing suddenly become more valuable? To become more productive OF COURSE you have change jobs. Either within your current organisation, maybe you have your current position's description changed, or you have to move to another company where you can perform more valuable work.
Remember you get paid for what you produce. You're employee, you rent yourself out to an employer to do a certain job. That job has a certain value, and that value is what you produce. You don't get serious raises just for being there longer than two, three years, you only get serious raises by producing more for your employer. Expecting anything more than getting paid for what your work is worth is downright stupid.
I would say this malware IS DRM. Because what it does is it encrypts the content, and then demands money to have it decrypted. Sounds very much like your average DRM scheme.
A key difference appears to be that this one actually works - at least there is no mention in the article of it having been broken yet.
While certain elements of government and pressure group may believe that glimpsing a penis traumatises children for life, there is no real evidence for this. Children are just not that fragile. A better approach is to just explain to them that there are naughty pictures on the internet and they should just close the tab.
And at the same time YouTube is allowing snuff movies again. Specifically those of beheadings by terrorist groups and so. But of course seeing someone's head being chopped off is far from as traumatising as seeing two people having fun without clothes on.
From the stories I read about it, I get the impression that Silk Road acted more like eBay, a platform allowing independent vendors sell their product. So the operator of the Silk Road only took a certain percentage of the deals, they didn't handle the drugs and other products directly. That doesn't mean it was a small operation overall, of course.
For most of 2013, the bitcoin traded at around USD 120 each. So 144k BTC would be worth over 17 mln USD. And that's after cost. Not likely he had many staff or so, just had to rent a handful of servers and maintain a web site. So maybe 2 mln in cost, including living expenses and so. Let's be generous. And that's assuming he kept all profits in BTC, not selling much of it and storing that cash elsewhere.
Now if that 19 mln is a 10% share of the turnover of these trades (no idea how much it really was - this seems to be the typical cost of selling on eBay), it means a total turnover of some USD 190 mln. No matter what, a lot was traded here.
For the next rev, they need a way to keep crypto-currency within an exchange rate band.
For that you need an organisation that acts as a central bank. And for that organisation you need money. A lot of it. In both the currency you want to protect (Bitcoin), and other currencies (USD, EUR, JPY, whatever).
Now it is feasible for someone, say a large company or a bank, to have a ready supply of these other currencies, and they could be that "bitcoin central bank".
It is however not feasible to have a sufficient supply of bitcoin, for the simple reason that there is a limited supply, and the only way to get more bitcoin is to buy them. When you link one currency to another (such as the HKD is linked to the USD at a mid rate of 7.8 HKD for 1 USD and a narrow trading band), there will be times you have to intervene in normal times to keep the thing stable. So start selling BTC when the price gets too high, buying them when the price gets too low. A central bank will print more money of their currency to sell if the price gets too high, and starts taking them back in when the price gets too low (effectively removing the currency from the system).
This part may work with BTC.
Until the market thinks the fixed value is off, and speculators band together and start attacking the currency, buying BTC in large quantities thinking the value will go up. Or if for another reason the demand for BTC increases dramatically. Before long, the central bank will run out of BTC, and with no means of producing more they lost the battle in the blink of an eye and the price shoots up again.
Now of course speculators know this. They know the capacity of the defending authority, versus their own power. And there is virtually no way for a BTC rate stabilising organisation to have any power against these speculators.
The HKD has been under attack before, and these attacks have always been fended off by the Hong Kong government. Speculators now know that they do not have the power to dislodge this exchange rate, and don't try. The currency is stable against the USD.
Probably some time in the future the speculators will try again. Probably they will lose, again, confirming the strength and stability of the currency. Maybe they win, like they did when attacking the THB, at the time triggering the Asian financial crisis.
The Euro was not "dramatically volatile" at any point. It's been trading for about $1.20 to $1.40 consistently for the last ten years
The Euro was perfectly stable - especially for those using it within the Eurozone. It was the USD that showed this serious volatility!
On a more serious note: Bitcoin is not a currency as such, so it's indeed Bitcoin that's volatile. For the traditional currencies, it's not so clear. However over the past few years it's mostly USD that's gone down against most other currencies. Not the EUR that's gone up so much.
And the irony here, is that without this copyright issue, these tracks might not have been releases at all.
The purpose of copyright is to have people produce, and in extension release their work. In this case it's quite easy to argue that the copyright laws helped directly in getting this released. Had there not been this 20-year extension rule, most likely they'd have let the copyrights expire and possibly simply dump the tapes in the garbage bin, only to be lost forever.
Oh, and there is no **AA organisation involved. From the shortish terms you should've known that this is not US copyright. This is EU copyright.
By the way, I'm not trying to argue that this 50/70 year thing is good or bad. Just trying to show how stupid GP's comment really is - if the way it's written half in the subject half in the body didn't tip you off already.
You get that extra 10 secs of video at no more than the maximum transfer speeds. So in practice far less than 10 extra seconds of video to buffer - shouldn't be a real issue for a properly written app.
I'm not american, lived and visited several parts of the world. Love to talk and fit in with the locals and socialize.
Of course it's all anecdotal, but I'm pretty sure that something odd is going on in American culture. The times i've been there I couldn't help but finding amazing how such large parts of the population take behavioral related medication. I mean, even most TV commercials I saw were for anti depressants, or even complenents to them.
I'm surprised you're not surprised by seeing these commercials on TV.
I've never seen a commercial for anything stronger than basic over-the-counter medication. In most countries that's simply illegal.
I'd be really surprised if there would be commercials touting meds you can only get on a doctor's prescription. Advertising shouldn't even be an issue for those; the doctor is supposed to know about them and know what they do, so they can prescribe it to their patients when the need is there. But with those commercials I guess many patients will go to their doctor with the question "I want medicine X", instead of "I'm not feeling well, what's wrong?". And if the doctor refuses, they'll go to the silk road or so to buy them.
And actually for that part I can't blame the pharma companies. They do what they're supposed to do: sell stuff. It's failure of the government, whose job is to regulate this kind of stuff.
I thought Google (used to) do this automatically. By subsequent crawls see whether site had changed since previous visit, and if so increase frequency, if not decrease frequency. A large number of sites, and even more single pages, are completely static after all.
Why bestiality? They're supposed to be persons, not animals. So sex with chimps would not be bestiality. Just make sure you're not doing it with an underaged chimp.
What defines a pirate site, then? How can I tell? And if a site sells subscriptions for access to the latest movies, it must be legal, right?
How are users to tell whether the site has their copyrights in order, or not?
Downloading is legal in many European countries, and it should be. Someone offers you the material, implying they have the proper rights to distribute it to you (either streaming or as download), so you should be safe.
Probably not so much a problem of the cost of the space, good chance that it was more literally. It is really hard to find a single large space in HK, as in one that is large enough to build a Google-scale data centre.
Population of HK is just over 7 mln, and election committee was expanded to 1200 before the latest elections that saw Leung Chun-Ying elected CE. Please get your facts right. And while by far most election committee members are Beijing loyalists, not all are.
Mainland has to be very careful in their manipulating of the HK politics, as the general HK public doesn't like them doing this. They're indeed going quite far nowadays, and the situation is getting out of hand. Protests against this meddling are getting more and more radical as well.
Hong Kong is not China. For all practical purposes it is a different country. Different legal system, different laws, different culture, even different official language.
What the mainland government thinks about the Internet is quite irrelevant on this side of the border. Hong Kong has a very high level of freedom of expression, and our Internet is more free than that of certain "free" countries like the UK with its mandatory "anti-porn" filters.
But CyanogenMod's implementation isn't end-to-end. They instead have integrated crypto in the SMS messaging service of the OS. The intention is noble: You're not forced to use CyanogenMod's SMS App. You could use Skype or Facebook chat app (as long as the app supports handling SMS in addition to other communication)... The main problem is easy to spot:... These 3rd party app could actually be spying.
Same for CyanogenMod itself. Who says this addition hasn't been implemented by an NSA employee, backdoor and all?
Slashdot Mirror
I learn things in my free time in order to beef up my skills for the next employer since the only way you can get a raise is to change jobs.
You do a job, you get paid to do that job. How's that job you're doing suddenly become more valuable? To become more productive OF COURSE you have change jobs. Either within your current organisation, maybe you have your current position's description changed, or you have to move to another company where you can perform more valuable work.
Remember you get paid for what you produce. You're employee, you rent yourself out to an employer to do a certain job. That job has a certain value, and that value is what you produce. You don't get serious raises just for being there longer than two, three years, you only get serious raises by producing more for your employer. Expecting anything more than getting paid for what your work is worth is downright stupid.
Sounds like you have a pretty shitty job. Time to move on.
There is probably some secret law hidden deep in a drawer in the far corner of a dark dungeon that legalises this specific contract.
I would say this malware IS DRM. Because what it does is it encrypts the content, and then demands money to have it decrypted. Sounds very much like your average DRM scheme.
A key difference appears to be that this one actually works - at least there is no mention in the article of it having been broken yet.
While certain elements of government and pressure group may believe that glimpsing a penis traumatises children for life, there is no real evidence for this. Children are just not that fragile. A better approach is to just explain to them that there are naughty pictures on the internet and they should just close the tab.
And at the same time YouTube is allowing snuff movies again. Specifically those of beheadings by terrorist groups and so. But of course seeing someone's head being chopped off is far from as traumatising as seeing two people having fun without clothes on.
If you had only read TFS you'd realise the filter doesn't filter porn well. It does however filter out the biology part of it (sex ed websites).
What pharma companies is within the law. That's the key difference with criminals.
From the stories I read about it, I get the impression that Silk Road acted more like eBay, a platform allowing independent vendors sell their product. So the operator of the Silk Road only took a certain percentage of the deals, they didn't handle the drugs and other products directly. That doesn't mean it was a small operation overall, of course.
For most of 2013, the bitcoin traded at around USD 120 each. So 144k BTC would be worth over 17 mln USD. And that's after cost. Not likely he had many staff or so, just had to rent a handful of servers and maintain a web site. So maybe 2 mln in cost, including living expenses and so. Let's be generous. And that's assuming he kept all profits in BTC, not selling much of it and storing that cash elsewhere.
Now if that 19 mln is a 10% share of the turnover of these trades (no idea how much it really was - this seems to be the typical cost of selling on eBay), it means a total turnover of some USD 190 mln. No matter what, a lot was traded here.
For the next rev, they need a way to keep crypto-currency within an exchange rate band.
For that you need an organisation that acts as a central bank. And for that organisation you need money. A lot of it. In both the currency you want to protect (Bitcoin), and other currencies (USD, EUR, JPY, whatever).
Now it is feasible for someone, say a large company or a bank, to have a ready supply of these other currencies, and they could be that "bitcoin central bank".
It is however not feasible to have a sufficient supply of bitcoin, for the simple reason that there is a limited supply, and the only way to get more bitcoin is to buy them. When you link one currency to another (such as the HKD is linked to the USD at a mid rate of 7.8 HKD for 1 USD and a narrow trading band), there will be times you have to intervene in normal times to keep the thing stable. So start selling BTC when the price gets too high, buying them when the price gets too low. A central bank will print more money of their currency to sell if the price gets too high, and starts taking them back in when the price gets too low (effectively removing the currency from the system).
This part may work with BTC.
Until the market thinks the fixed value is off, and speculators band together and start attacking the currency, buying BTC in large quantities thinking the value will go up. Or if for another reason the demand for BTC increases dramatically. Before long, the central bank will run out of BTC, and with no means of producing more they lost the battle in the blink of an eye and the price shoots up again.
Now of course speculators know this. They know the capacity of the defending authority, versus their own power. And there is virtually no way for a BTC rate stabilising organisation to have any power against these speculators.
The HKD has been under attack before, and these attacks have always been fended off by the Hong Kong government. Speculators now know that they do not have the power to dislodge this exchange rate, and don't try. The currency is stable against the USD.
Probably some time in the future the speculators will try again. Probably they will lose, again, confirming the strength and stability of the currency. Maybe they win, like they did when attacking the THB, at the time triggering the Asian financial crisis.
The Euro was not "dramatically volatile" at any point. It's been trading for about $1.20 to $1.40 consistently for the last ten years
The Euro was perfectly stable - especially for those using it within the Eurozone. It was the USD that showed this serious volatility!
On a more serious note: Bitcoin is not a currency as such, so it's indeed Bitcoin that's volatile. For the traditional currencies, it's not so clear. However over the past few years it's mostly USD that's gone down against most other currencies. Not the EUR that's gone up so much.
And the irony here, is that without this copyright issue, these tracks might not have been releases at all.
The purpose of copyright is to have people produce, and in extension release their work. In this case it's quite easy to argue that the copyright laws helped directly in getting this released. Had there not been this 20-year extension rule, most likely they'd have let the copyrights expire and possibly simply dump the tapes in the garbage bin, only to be lost forever.
Oh, and there is no **AA organisation involved. From the shortish terms you should've known that this is not US copyright. This is EU copyright.
By the way, I'm not trying to argue that this 50/70 year thing is good or bad. Just trying to show how stupid GP's comment really is - if the way it's written half in the subject half in the body didn't tip you off already.
You get that extra 10 secs of video at no more than the maximum transfer speeds. So in practice far less than 10 extra seconds of video to buffer - shouldn't be a real issue for a properly written app.
That must be different biblical communities than those that reject even regular vaccinations, in their attempts to be as religious as possible.
I'm not american, lived and visited several parts of the world. Love to talk and fit in with the locals and socialize.
Of course it's all anecdotal, but I'm pretty sure that something odd is going on in American culture. The times i've been there I couldn't help but finding amazing how such large parts of the population take behavioral related medication. I mean, even most TV commercials I saw were for anti depressants, or even complenents to them.
I'm surprised you're not surprised by seeing these commercials on TV.
I've never seen a commercial for anything stronger than basic over-the-counter medication. In most countries that's simply illegal.
I'd be really surprised if there would be commercials touting meds you can only get on a doctor's prescription. Advertising shouldn't even be an issue for those; the doctor is supposed to know about them and know what they do, so they can prescribe it to their patients when the need is there. But with those commercials I guess many patients will go to their doctor with the question "I want medicine X", instead of "I'm not feeling well, what's wrong?". And if the doctor refuses, they'll go to the silk road or so to buy them.
And actually for that part I can't blame the pharma companies. They do what they're supposed to do: sell stuff. It's failure of the government, whose job is to regulate this kind of stuff.
I thought Google (used to) do this automatically. By subsequent crawls see whether site had changed since previous visit, and if so increase frequency, if not decrease frequency. A large number of sites, and even more single pages, are completely static after all.
To their defense: they copied the BBC headline. Which of course was pretty poor, as well.
Why bestiality? They're supposed to be persons, not animals. So sex with chimps would not be bestiality. Just make sure you're not doing it with an underaged chimp.
You mean, they can't and won't do anything like that elsewhere, like in the USA?
What defines a pirate site, then? How can I tell? And if a site sells subscriptions for access to the latest movies, it must be legal, right?
How are users to tell whether the site has their copyrights in order, or not?
Downloading is legal in many European countries, and it should be. Someone offers you the material, implying they have the proper rights to distribute it to you (either streaming or as download), so you should be safe.
UK has those freedoms until the UK government decides to rescind it. Oh wait, they did already.
Probably not so much a problem of the cost of the space, good chance that it was more literally. It is really hard to find a single large space in HK, as in one that is large enough to build a Google-scale data centre.
Population of HK is just over 7 mln, and election committee was expanded to 1200 before the latest elections that saw Leung Chun-Ying elected CE. Please get your facts right. And while by far most election committee members are Beijing loyalists, not all are.
Mainland has to be very careful in their manipulating of the HK politics, as the general HK public doesn't like them doing this. They're indeed going quite far nowadays, and the situation is getting out of hand. Protests against this meddling are getting more and more radical as well.
Hong Kong is not China. For all practical purposes it is a different country. Different legal system, different laws, different culture, even different official language.
What the mainland government thinks about the Internet is quite irrelevant on this side of the border. Hong Kong has a very high level of freedom of expression, and our Internet is more free than that of certain "free" countries like the UK with its mandatory "anti-porn" filters.
But CyanogenMod's implementation isn't end-to-end. They instead have integrated crypto in the SMS messaging service of the OS. ... These 3rd party app could actually be spying.
The intention is noble: You're not forced to use CyanogenMod's SMS App. You could use Skype or Facebook chat app (as long as the app supports handling SMS in addition to other communication)...
The main problem is easy to spot:
Same for CyanogenMod itself. Who says this addition hasn't been implemented by an NSA employee, backdoor and all?