True enough, but the two used to be far closer together. You couldn't really put the Libertarian Party on one side of the political spectrum or the other, and there was quite a bit of internal debate over issues like abortion because the party drew so equally from the left and right sides of the spectrum. Now its fully occupied by the political right. And even if you might have described the party as laissez-faire, they were not so to such a rabid degree. Certainly, you always heard talk of less taxes and smaller government, but not to the extent of completely ignoring the governments role in promote positive externalities while minimizing negative ones. People who want to privatize everything right down to 911 services would have been viewed as complete wackos, but now they may well be the majority. You can't argue that the party hasn't changed quite a bit, and personally I think the changes take the Libertarian party further and further away from the libertarian ideal.
I replied to the guy above who had a similar post, but I think I'll respond to yours in a completely different way. I don't think the Double Pendulum is a very good example for a chaotic system. I know its been used as one for years, but things have changed. The double pendulum's reputation is due more to human perception than to actual chaotic behavior.
Certainly, there is uncertainty. You do not know the starting variables, so you cannot predict the movement. And I think the math is involved is complicated enough that before computers, it wouldn't have mattered if you did know the starting variables. But that's changed now.
If you knew all the variables and had a computer to run them through the formulas for you, you'd find that you could model the exact position of a double pendulum with a degree of accuracy very close to that of a single pendulum. If both are deterministic, and you have the capability to accurately model both, can you really call one chaotic and the other not? Chaos theory is all about whether or not something is predictable. The Double pendulum *can* be predictable with a high degree of accuracy. When the double pendulum became a "classic" example of chaos theory, this was not the case, but it is today.
Yes, there are more variables in a double pendulum than a single one, and therefore more uncertainties. Each uncertainty allows a certain amount of informational entropy into your system which eventually leads to a true chaos. Chaos Theory absolutely applies to a system with thousands of variables like the weather, but with a double pendulum and a single pendulum, very little of the "chaos" is due to actual entropy and far more to simple human perception. The double pendulum just plain looks more chaotic, but I honestly believe this is just a human bias. A robot would not see one system as particularly more chaotic than the other.
Whether or not its chaotic depends on your scale. Strictly speaking, from a definition point of view, it is not. Chaos literally means lacking order. This is far from the case with the double pendulum. It is not a chaotic system by a dictionary definition. Of course, when you talk about Chaos Theory, you are not talking about the dictionary definition of Chaos. Chaos Theory is concerned with things that are unpredictable. Without knowing the random variables at the start, you cannot predict the specific outcome. This may or may not seem to be chaotic depending on your scale.
The weather is another classic example. If I ask you for tomorrows weather, you can make a semi-accurate guess. If I ask you for an hourly breakdown, you will be less accurate. If I ask you for a minute by minute breakdown, you will be less accurate still. Now imagine I ask you to describe the weather over the next million years. You'd be highly accurate, though nonspecific. You could tell me how much AVERAGE rainfall I would expect per year, as well as what sort of outlying scenarios I might expect. You could tell me how many times in a thousand years I might expect to see a certain river flood. You could give me averages, highs and lows for any number of variables. From the right scale, its completely predictable. The same is true of the double pendulum. I might not know the exact position of each axis in 5 seconds, but I know its bounds and its averages. I know where it can't be, and where its likely to be.
Ecosystems are like this. The more narrow your scale, the more they seem to fluctuate and change. In fact, generally speaking, this is probably true of all things right down to the level of quantum uncertainty. But to say that an ecosystem doesn't reach equilibrium simply because it constantly changes is silly. A forest and a desert are two very different ecosystems, and it is not uncommon for one to become the other. That is what a true shift in equilibrium looks like, but these are not the sort of shits that happen to every ecosystem every day.
Depends on what you consider to be an equilibrium. For instance, imagine a teeter-totter. It goes back and forth, but it does so predictably. That, to me, is equilibrium. That's a very simple system, but ecosystems are not simple at all.
When Steven Jay Gould spoke of stasis and punctuated equilibrium, I don't think he was really using those terms in the way most people might consider them. Certainly, day to day, things change. But in the bigger picture, evolution will naturally drive us towards what, relatively speaking, is equilibrium. There's a steady rhythm, a natural cycle that might not seem very predictable to human eyes.
Check out this double pendulum.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmTiyTut6A
Seems chaotic, right? But its not. It's just complex--too complex for humans. Your average ecosystem is like a ten-thousand part pendulum. One year there might be 10x as many frogs running around as the year before, due to a confluence of other conditions, and the next year there's a drought and there's hardly any. Even though everything seems to be in flux, it's still in a state of equilibrium. From day to day, things seem different, but if you look at a much, much bigger picture, you find that things stay the same for long periods of time until there's some massive disruption.
Do you really want to live in a world where every time HR hands you something to sign you have to pay a contract lawyer $2000 dollars to review it first? Of course we're heading down that road already with EULAs . . .
Yeah, people think its like the movie hackers. Whenever an attack happens, an alarm goes off and a security sits down into a chair and frantically begins typing in a frantic attempt to protect the Gibson. "He's breached the 3rd firewall!!!"
That's just not how it works. Holes have to be closed *before* someone/something goes through them. If they hadn't found this hole for all the time it existed before it was exploited, odds are they weren't going to just happen to find it over the course of the subsequent week after they were fired.
I do believe Sony was negligent in its handling of sensitive customer information, though this is probably more common than we'd like to think. The vast majority of these exploits were found with an off-the-shell point-and-click vulnerability finder. That one website should fall to this sort of thing is a shame, when 20+ do over the span of a few weeks, its another matter entirely. Sony could have prevented many of these simply by running the exact same publicly named tool themselves after the first 2-3 incidents. That more Sony websites continue to be breached daily by the same method is simply inexcusable.
All of that said, these security holes didn't just magically appear after these people were fired, they were there for months if not years. If these people were not competent enough to find such trivial exploits, then they really didn't deserve to keep their jobs and having them on staff after the attacks began likely would not have improved the situation.
That's actually exactly what makes it "democratic". Of course, their need to be good tools to support it. There can be 1 million bad books on a subject that are just spam books which should all be reviewed badly and rarely purchased, as long as the 1 that is reviewed well and purchased often shows up at the top of the list when you search. You need a good Google-esque algorithm to try to filter out the crap. Oh sure, just like with Google people will try to beat the algorithm, but cream will rise to the surface if there's any mechanism whatsoever for it do so--it just might take a bit longer than we'd like.
Not actively necessarily, but their payment scheme certainly pushes people towards a 2.99 price point. At 2.99, you take in 70% or 2.10. At 99 cents you get 1/6th of that. So it's more profit to you to sell 20 copies at 2.99 than 100 at 99 cents and less money for Amazon. Of course, if you're going to sell 6x as many copies or more at 99 cents, then you might as well go 99 cents. It's clearly better to sell 600 copies at 99 cents than 100 at 2.99, since you're going to make the same money, but reach more readers and gain name recognition for future books.
The sticky point is how to value name recognition. Maybe it's better to sell 10,000 copies at 99 cents than 5,000 at 2.99, even though you would make 3x more money at the second price point--if your second book will be out soon and you plan to sell *it* at 2.99 to 10,000 people now willing to shell out a bit more for a name they know.
The security vulnerability was literally as simple as changing one number in a url to a different one, at random. From user 2340823 to User 2347923 or whatever. When the door is wide open, you can't complain if people don't knock. It's not like he actually got into anyone's account; it's more like he just said "Hi, I'm user 2342323" and the computer said "Oh hi, John@fakeemail.com, what's your password?" and then he said "Nevermind." Nobody's account was logged in to, and nobody's personal information was accessed, aside from the information being leaked by AT&T in their sloppy login process.
Nobody should ever face jail time for something so trivial and stupid.
I don't know that I could name 3 off the top of my head, but just the other day Lastpass took an *extremely* proactive approach to security. They had everyone change their passwords on just the hint of a suspicion that something might be amiss. I think they probably regretted it after, though, given how it simply played out in the media as "lastpass hacked' when apparently they were "pretty sure" they hadn't been, but were just being cautious.
Google it if you want the full story, but certainly there wasn't or hasn't been since any kind of database of lastpass password hashes leaked, nor any hackers claiming to have hacked them.
The thing is, the disclosures by hackers typically come so soon after the intrusion that its impossible for companies to come out and say "Yeah, we were hacked, here's what we need you to do" before the databases get leaked to the web. Such was the case with Gawker, Sony, Nintendo and other recent high-profile hacks.
The Mtgox affair was unique in that you had hackers at least 5 days ago saying "We hacked MtGox" without actaully releasing proof. Typically if you're going to brag about your crime you give proof otherwise its not really a proper trophy. So the position MtGox was in was somewhat different than normal in that they had a *chance* to be proactive in the first place.
I should add to this that MtGox is now saying that it wasn't one of their systems that was compromised, but that of one of their auditors and that's how they were unaware of the intrusion. Given that the withdrawal limit has been around, its hard to say exactly what MtGox should have done. They had to know at least as much as I did, which was that there were rumors, an upsurge in compromised accounts and people offering to sell the database, but perhaps that's all the information they had. In that case, It would be harder to condemn them.
Maybe they truly believed it was all just rumors in some attempt to manipulate the market, certainly I suspected it might only be that. If that's the case, I'm not sure what the proper way forward would have been.
This is not really a bitcoin story
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 5, Informative
So much as it is a MTGox story.
About a week ago the first rumors of MtGox being compromised by a SQL injection exploit began to circulate. Here's one of the original claims from someone calling themselves Buttsec from June 14th. Others which I'm too lazy to dig up were more specific and named MtGox explictly: http://pastebin.com/4NPemHfz
On that very same day, MTGox implemented a $1000 dollar withdrawal limit. Suspicious, right? For the past 3 days, there have been offers to sell MTGox's database of usernames and password hashes. Here's an example:
This confirms MTGox was indeed hacked. One of the hackers offering to sell this database that came out today had even specifically mentioned that the hole he had used was CLOSED by MTGox a couple of days ago. Today, FINALLY, MTGox admits they were hacked and has sent out emails to all their users. Here is a copy: http://pastebin.com/9Cx94wzs
In light of all of the evidence (more of which I'm sure you can find on your own), I find it very hard to believe that MtGox was not aware they had been hacked, and yet they've been denying it and operating normally (aside from the newly added withdrawal limit, which they even boast about in the linked press release). In fact, I found one reddit page of many where MtGox users were complaining there accounts had been compromised (There have been many over the past week) and the employee flat out denies that they have ANY reason to suspect they've been compromised:
Long story short: For the last week (5 days at least), I've been wondering if MtGox had been truly hacked or if someone was just trying to depress the price of bitcoins by spreading rumors. Today I don't have to wonder anymore. What I do have to wonder about is why has MtGox kept silent for the past week when ALL indications were that they KNEW. They fixed the hole, added the withdrawal limit, and yet kept on denying they had an issue when dozens of users complained of account compromises. Rather than admit the issue and try to have it fixed, they apparently tried to keep it a secret. How can we trust any company that handles security issues in this manner?
I was only suggesting that I believe our current deficit spending is less than our total Military spending, thus we could balance the budget without cutting anything other than military expenditures. Since I was too lazy to do that before, I did it just now and confirmed that to be correct. I suppose that does oversimplify the situation to a degree.
Social Security is a whole other matter. I'm sure it will have to be tweaked here and there to keep costs reasonable. No doubt the retirement age will be increased by a couple of years at minimum . . . If that doesn't fix it, then we might look into investing into Soylent Green technology . . .
They could cut pensions, if they passed a law to do it. Otherwise it would be tricky. The federal government can't declare bankruptcy like a large corporation can--or perhaps it could (again by passing it as a law), but I doubt that's a road we want to go down.
It wasn't really until Reagan that the National Debt took on a life of its own. It was tiny enough in the past that it was never really an issue, but Reagan, for better or for worse, decided to win the Cold War by spending so much the Russian government wouldn't be able to feed its citizens if it tried to keep up. The military industrial complex being what it is, we've never really drawn back from that unreasonably high level of spending on our military. Meanwhile, it's supporters engage in all manner of frantic arm waving to try to distract the public's attention towards lesser costs like money for the arts, NASA, social welfare programs, and health care initiatives. Never mind that the positive externalities of these programs more than justify the costs--they make easy targets to a public that wouldn't understand the notion of a cost-benefit analysis unless Garth Brooks wrote a song about it.
While I appreciate that some so-called "Libertarians" see past this and want to cut military funding to the same degree they want to cut everything else, I find that too often they have a naive sort of blind faith in the free market and a weak understanding of the game theory underpinnings of modern political science. Most government spending is worthwhile in the sense that it generates more benefit to the public than it costs, the cost per person is low, and that it would be unaffordable without the pooled collective spending power of an entire nation (that is to say, the fixed costs are such that the unit cost can only be reasonable with a full buy-in from the entire tax-paying public).
In short, you are correct that government spending is simply too high to sustain long term--but not by such a large margin as you may think. The current tax rates are fine--even those under Clinton (which only were higher for those making far more money than myself and likely you as well) were not too burdensome for industry. Despite the protestations of some libertarians, Atlas Shrugged, if it could happen, would never happen at our current modest tax rates. I think we could easily work our way to a surplus through Military cuts alone, though I can't be bothered to go look up the exact numbers--and to make our spending completely sustainable, all we need is a $1 dollar surplus.
Nobody is trying to brute force a remote login--your account would be locked after a few failed attempts anyways. This is only a valid approach if you've somehow got your hands on the hash file. More and more we see people like sony having plaintext passwords or Gizmodo have unhashed (reversible encryption) passwords. The sites that have your password properly stored as a hash are not the ones getting hacked in the first place.
Yeah, it's the same thing that happens now on jailbroken iPhones with hackulo.us. They host a repo for iPhone warez, and you take a pretty huge risk by installing any of it--though if you're just some kid, what do you care?
Another hysterical headline. Can we please stop doing this? I vote Timothy is no longer allowed to post Google stories--clearly Google killed his puppy or something and he simply can't get past it.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough, but the two used to be far closer together. You couldn't really put the Libertarian Party on one side of the political spectrum or the other, and there was quite a bit of internal debate over issues like abortion because the party drew so equally from the left and right sides of the spectrum. Now its fully occupied by the political right. And even if you might have described the party as laissez-faire, they were not so to such a rabid degree. Certainly, you always heard talk of less taxes and smaller government, but not to the extent of completely ignoring the governments role in promote positive externalities while minimizing negative ones. People who want to privatize everything right down to 911 services would have been viewed as complete wackos, but now they may well be the majority. You can't argue that the party hasn't changed quite a bit, and personally I think the changes take the Libertarian party further and further away from the libertarian ideal.
I replied to the guy above who had a similar post, but I think I'll respond to yours in a completely different way. I don't think the Double Pendulum is a very good example for a chaotic system. I know its been used as one for years, but things have changed. The double pendulum's reputation is due more to human perception than to actual chaotic behavior.
Certainly, there is uncertainty. You do not know the starting variables, so you cannot predict the movement. And I think the math is involved is complicated enough that before computers, it wouldn't have mattered if you did know the starting variables. But that's changed now.
If you knew all the variables and had a computer to run them through the formulas for you, you'd find that you could model the exact position of a double pendulum with a degree of accuracy very close to that of a single pendulum. If both are deterministic, and you have the capability to accurately model both, can you really call one chaotic and the other not? Chaos theory is all about whether or not something is predictable. The Double pendulum *can* be predictable with a high degree of accuracy. When the double pendulum became a "classic" example of chaos theory, this was not the case, but it is today.
Yes, there are more variables in a double pendulum than a single one, and therefore more uncertainties. Each uncertainty allows a certain amount of informational entropy into your system which eventually leads to a true chaos. Chaos Theory absolutely applies to a system with thousands of variables like the weather, but with a double pendulum and a single pendulum, very little of the "chaos" is due to actual entropy and far more to simple human perception. The double pendulum just plain looks more chaotic, but I honestly believe this is just a human bias. A robot would not see one system as particularly more chaotic than the other.
Whether or not its chaotic depends on your scale. Strictly speaking, from a definition point of view, it is not. Chaos literally means lacking order. This is far from the case with the double pendulum. It is not a chaotic system by a dictionary definition. Of course, when you talk about Chaos Theory, you are not talking about the dictionary definition of Chaos. Chaos Theory is concerned with things that are unpredictable. Without knowing the random variables at the start, you cannot predict the specific outcome. This may or may not seem to be chaotic depending on your scale.
The weather is another classic example. If I ask you for tomorrows weather, you can make a semi-accurate guess. If I ask you for an hourly breakdown, you will be less accurate. If I ask you for a minute by minute breakdown, you will be less accurate still. Now imagine I ask you to describe the weather over the next million years. You'd be highly accurate, though nonspecific. You could tell me how much AVERAGE rainfall I would expect per year, as well as what sort of outlying scenarios I might expect. You could tell me how many times in a thousand years I might expect to see a certain river flood. You could give me averages, highs and lows for any number of variables. From the right scale, its completely predictable. The same is true of the double pendulum. I might not know the exact position of each axis in 5 seconds, but I know its bounds and its averages. I know where it can't be, and where its likely to be.
Ecosystems are like this. The more narrow your scale, the more they seem to fluctuate and change. In fact, generally speaking, this is probably true of all things right down to the level of quantum uncertainty. But to say that an ecosystem doesn't reach equilibrium simply because it constantly changes is silly. A forest and a desert are two very different ecosystems, and it is not uncommon for one to become the other. That is what a true shift in equilibrium looks like, but these are not the sort of shits that happen to every ecosystem every day.
Depends on what you consider to be an equilibrium. For instance, imagine a teeter-totter. It goes back and forth, but it does so predictably. That, to me, is equilibrium. That's a very simple system, but ecosystems are not simple at all.
When Steven Jay Gould spoke of stasis and punctuated equilibrium, I don't think he was really using those terms in the way most people might consider them. Certainly, day to day, things change. But in the bigger picture, evolution will naturally drive us towards what, relatively speaking, is equilibrium. There's a steady rhythm, a natural cycle that might not seem very predictable to human eyes.
Check out this double pendulum.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmTiyTut6A
Seems chaotic, right? But its not. It's just complex--too complex for humans. Your average ecosystem is like a ten-thousand part pendulum. One year there might be 10x as many frogs running around as the year before, due to a confluence of other conditions, and the next year there's a drought and there's hardly any. Even though everything seems to be in flux, it's still in a state of equilibrium. From day to day, things seem different, but if you look at a much, much bigger picture, you find that things stay the same for long periods of time until there's some massive disruption.
I question whether many of you using that word have any idea what it means
Particularly true of almost everyone using it to refer to themselves. The ACLU, for instance, is a Libertarian organization by definition.
I don't know when Libertarian became about irrational free-market worship or "sovereign citizens".
Paying a contract lawyer for 2 hours could easily cost you more than $1000 . . .
Do you really want to live in a world where every time HR hands you something to sign you have to pay a contract lawyer $2000 dollars to review it first? Of course we're heading down that road already with EULAs . . .
Yeah, people think its like the movie hackers. Whenever an attack happens, an alarm goes off and a security sits down into a chair and frantically begins typing in a frantic attempt to protect the Gibson. "He's breached the 3rd firewall!!!"
That's just not how it works. Holes have to be closed *before* someone/something goes through them. If they hadn't found this hole for all the time it existed before it was exploited, odds are they weren't going to just happen to find it over the course of the subsequent week after they were fired.
I do believe Sony was negligent in its handling of sensitive customer information, though this is probably more common than we'd like to think. The vast majority of these exploits were found with an off-the-shell point-and-click vulnerability finder. That one website should fall to this sort of thing is a shame, when 20+ do over the span of a few weeks, its another matter entirely. Sony could have prevented many of these simply by running the exact same publicly named tool themselves after the first 2-3 incidents. That more Sony websites continue to be breached daily by the same method is simply inexcusable.
All of that said, these security holes didn't just magically appear after these people were fired, they were there for months if not years. If these people were not competent enough to find such trivial exploits, then they really didn't deserve to keep their jobs and having them on staff after the attacks began likely would not have improved the situation.
That's actually exactly what makes it "democratic". Of course, their need to be good tools to support it. There can be 1 million bad books on a subject that are just spam books which should all be reviewed badly and rarely purchased, as long as the 1 that is reviewed well and purchased often shows up at the top of the list when you search. You need a good Google-esque algorithm to try to filter out the crap. Oh sure, just like with Google people will try to beat the algorithm, but cream will rise to the surface if there's any mechanism whatsoever for it do so--it just might take a bit longer than we'd like.
Not actively necessarily, but their payment scheme certainly pushes people towards a 2.99 price point. At 2.99, you take in 70% or 2.10. At 99 cents you get 1/6th of that. So it's more profit to you to sell 20 copies at 2.99 than 100 at 99 cents and less money for Amazon. Of course, if you're going to sell 6x as many copies or more at 99 cents, then you might as well go 99 cents. It's clearly better to sell 600 copies at 99 cents than 100 at 2.99, since you're going to make the same money, but reach more readers and gain name recognition for future books.
The sticky point is how to value name recognition. Maybe it's better to sell 10,000 copies at 99 cents than 5,000 at 2.99, even though you would make 3x more money at the second price point--if your second book will be out soon and you plan to sell *it* at 2.99 to 10,000 people now willing to shell out a bit more for a name they know.
The security vulnerability was literally as simple as changing one number in a url to a different one, at random. From user 2340823 to User 2347923 or whatever. When the door is wide open, you can't complain if people don't knock. It's not like he actually got into anyone's account; it's more like he just said "Hi, I'm user 2342323" and the computer said "Oh hi, John@fakeemail.com, what's your password?" and then he said "Nevermind." Nobody's account was logged in to, and nobody's personal information was accessed, aside from the information being leaked by AT&T in their sloppy login process.
Nobody should ever face jail time for something so trivial and stupid.
"That's not a denial of service attack! This is a denial of service attack."
I don't know that I could name 3 off the top of my head, but just the other day Lastpass took an *extremely* proactive approach to security. They had everyone change their passwords on just the hint of a suspicion that something might be amiss. I think they probably regretted it after, though, given how it simply played out in the media as "lastpass hacked' when apparently they were "pretty sure" they hadn't been, but were just being cautious.
Google it if you want the full story, but certainly there wasn't or hasn't been since any kind of database of lastpass password hashes leaked, nor any hackers claiming to have hacked them.
The thing is, the disclosures by hackers typically come so soon after the intrusion that its impossible for companies to come out and say "Yeah, we were hacked, here's what we need you to do" before the databases get leaked to the web. Such was the case with Gawker, Sony, Nintendo and other recent high-profile hacks.
The Mtgox affair was unique in that you had hackers at least 5 days ago saying "We hacked MtGox" without actaully releasing proof. Typically if you're going to brag about your crime you give proof otherwise its not really a proper trophy. So the position MtGox was in was somewhat different than normal in that they had a *chance* to be proactive in the first place.
I should add to this that MtGox is now saying that it wasn't one of their systems that was compromised, but that of one of their auditors and that's how they were unaware of the intrusion. Given that the withdrawal limit has been around, its hard to say exactly what MtGox should have done. They had to know at least as much as I did, which was that there were rumors, an upsurge in compromised accounts and people offering to sell the database, but perhaps that's all the information they had. In that case, It would be harder to condemn them.
Maybe they truly believed it was all just rumors in some attempt to manipulate the market, certainly I suspected it might only be that. If that's the case, I'm not sure what the proper way forward would have been.
Good catch. I had that wrong I guess.
So much as it is a MTGox story.
About a week ago the first rumors of MtGox being compromised by a SQL injection exploit began to circulate.
Here's one of the original claims from someone calling themselves Buttsec from June 14th. Others which I'm too lazy to dig up were more specific and named MtGox explictly:
http://pastebin.com/4NPemHfz
On that very same day, MTGox implemented a $1000 dollar withdrawal limit. Suspicious, right? For the past 3 days, there have been offers to sell MTGox's database of usernames and password hashes. Here's an example:
http://pastebin.com/ui0nusuZ
Today, there is this:
http://pastebin.com/hN7PxRhc
http://pastebin.com/w06pa2mB (there are many of these, the first link gives you the urls if you want to see them all)
This confirms MTGox was indeed hacked. One of the hackers offering to sell this database that came out today had even specifically mentioned that the hole he had used was CLOSED by MTGox a couple of days ago. Today, FINALLY, MTGox admits they were hacked and has sent out emails to all their users. Here is a copy:
http://pastebin.com/9Cx94wzs
In light of all of the evidence (more of which I'm sure you can find on your own), I find it very hard to believe that MtGox was not aware they had been hacked, and yet they've been denying it and operating normally (aside from the newly added withdrawal limit, which they even boast about in the linked press release). In fact, I found one reddit page of many where MtGox users were complaining there accounts had been compromised (There have been many over the past week) and the employee flat out denies that they have ANY reason to suspect they've been compromised:
Here's one such complaint among many: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/i17jd/i_just_got_ripped_off_on_mtgox/
And here's one with an employee denial: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/i2dkn/mt_gox_has_some_serious_issues/
Here's all that (purported) employees posts: http://www.reddit.com/user/MtGox_Adam
Long story short: For the last week (5 days at least), I've been wondering if MtGox had been truly hacked or if someone was just trying to depress the price of bitcoins by spreading rumors. Today I don't have to wonder anymore. What I do have to wonder about is why has MtGox kept silent for the past week when ALL indications were that they KNEW. They fixed the hole, added the withdrawal limit, and yet kept on denying they had an issue when dozens of users complained of account compromises. Rather than admit the issue and try to have it fixed, they apparently tried to keep it a secret. How can we trust any company that handles security issues in this manner?
I was only suggesting that I believe our current deficit spending is less than our total Military spending, thus we could balance the budget without cutting anything other than military expenditures. Since I was too lazy to do that before, I did it just now and confirmed that to be correct. I suppose that does oversimplify the situation to a degree.
Social Security is a whole other matter. I'm sure it will have to be tweaked here and there to keep costs reasonable. No doubt the retirement age will be increased by a couple of years at minimum . . . If that doesn't fix it, then we might look into investing into Soylent Green technology . . .
They could cut pensions, if they passed a law to do it. Otherwise it would be tricky. The federal government can't declare bankruptcy like a large corporation can--or perhaps it could (again by passing it as a law), but I doubt that's a road we want to go down.
It wasn't really until Reagan that the National Debt took on a life of its own. It was tiny enough in the past that it was never really an issue, but Reagan, for better or for worse, decided to win the Cold War by spending so much the Russian government wouldn't be able to feed its citizens if it tried to keep up. The military industrial complex being what it is, we've never really drawn back from that unreasonably high level of spending on our military. Meanwhile, it's supporters engage in all manner of frantic arm waving to try to distract the public's attention towards lesser costs like money for the arts, NASA, social welfare programs, and health care initiatives. Never mind that the positive externalities of these programs more than justify the costs--they make easy targets to a public that wouldn't understand the notion of a cost-benefit analysis unless Garth Brooks wrote a song about it.
While I appreciate that some so-called "Libertarians" see past this and want to cut military funding to the same degree they want to cut everything else, I find that too often they have a naive sort of blind faith in the free market and a weak understanding of the game theory underpinnings of modern political science. Most government spending is worthwhile in the sense that it generates more benefit to the public than it costs, the cost per person is low, and that it would be unaffordable without the pooled collective spending power of an entire nation (that is to say, the fixed costs are such that the unit cost can only be reasonable with a full buy-in from the entire tax-paying public).
In short, you are correct that government spending is simply too high to sustain long term--but not by such a large margin as you may think. The current tax rates are fine--even those under Clinton (which only were higher for those making far more money than myself and likely you as well) were not too burdensome for industry. Despite the protestations of some libertarians, Atlas Shrugged, if it could happen, would never happen at our current modest tax rates. I think we could easily work our way to a surplus through Military cuts alone, though I can't be bothered to go look up the exact numbers--and to make our spending completely sustainable, all we need is a $1 dollar surplus.
Both of those have malware. You haven't been paying attention. There's a nearly 1:1 ratio of malware stories for both platforms.
Also your
Nobody is trying to brute force a remote login--your account would be locked after a few failed attempts anyways. This is only a valid approach if you've somehow got your hands on the hash file. More and more we see people like sony having plaintext passwords or Gizmodo have unhashed (reversible encryption) passwords. The sites that have your password properly stored as a hash are not the ones getting hacked in the first place.
Yeah, it's the same thing that happens now on jailbroken iPhones with hackulo.us. They host a repo for iPhone warez, and you take a pretty huge risk by installing any of it--though if you're just some kid, what do you care?
They'd patent this idea and then sue anyone who tried to follow suit.
Another hysterical headline. Can we please stop doing this? I vote Timothy is no longer allowed to post Google stories--clearly Google killed his puppy or something and he simply can't get past it.