How: Anyone can get on Tor, get on Silk Road, and watch what's going on. Anonymity doesn't do shit when half the nodes are run by three letter acronyms and you end up selling BTC on MtGox for USD.
The only questions I have have are about the seizure and the hacking.
How do you seize BTC? Surely they had an encrypted wallet and copious backups, right? The feds can take your wallet and do exactly nothing with it, while you could then reproduce your wallet from one of your backups and have instant access to your BTC.
Why was he hit with a hacking charge? Because he did things with a computer?
The summary doesn't even mention the researcher's name? I mean, I agree that this is useless, pointless "research". But if you're going to piss about and drop Project Gutenburg and "Google Books Corpus" which are only tangentially related, couldn't you at least give "this guy" a fucking name?
I am so fucking sick of the "image with rectangle overlay so we can put text on top of it" theme.
If your image isn't indicative of your content, it doesn't belong there. Get rid of the image and just use text for your headline. If it is indicative of your content, don't cover up half of it with a semi-transparent rectangle with text and icons in it. Put the text above the image.
Furthermore, shoving multiple images together so that they actually adjoin when they represent separate content is retarded. Even if you want to adopt the "flat, sharp, "modern"" style (really, the Windows 8 "formerly-known-as-Metro" style), you should use the space you have.
I've got a 1280x1024 window for you to work with (minus scroll bars). This has been bog standard for a decade. There's no reason I should be looking at a filmstrip of content that's 600px wide and off center, with 3 adjoining images in a 560px wide square, each 50% covered by a white rectangle with text.
Furthermore, the bottom left image links to Story B but the bottom left semi-transparent rectangle links to nothing (it only the text links), and the bottom right image ALSO links to Story B, when it should link to Story C (the text for Image C does link to Story C).
not because the company distrusts NIST, but because its executives are worried about the NSA's influence on NIST's development of ciphers in the last couple of decades.
If "executives are worried about the NSA's influence on NIST's development of ciphers in the last couple of decades" then "the company distrusts NIST".
Actually one way to define NP is that the solutions can be verified in polynomial time; although the complexity class is usually defined in terms of a universal turing machine.
I think you might be confusing NP with NP-hard.
That's not "one way to define NP" unless you want to define it incorrectly. I'm not confusing anything. OP talked in general about NP and got it very wrong. You can't verify a solutions to all NP problems in polynomial time.
You should probably review my post. You cannot say that solutions to NP problems can be verified in polynomial time on a classical computer. That's only true for a subset of NP problems. Typically, anything dealing with "Find the shortest/cheapest/<whatever>est <whatever> that satisfies <whatever>" will still be NP on verification. These tend to be similar to problems we deal with in the real world.
If a quantum computer makes a calculation in a forest and no one is around to verify it, does it solve the problem?
No, but Google will push it out as a staggered update anyway and silently tweak it for 2 years before pulling the whole thing and telling people to use the new Quantum tab on Google+.
If you have a blind spot your mirrors are adjusted wrong. Every Drivers Education course teaches students to adjust the mirrors so that the driver can see the side of the car, but unless you're worried about a quarter-panel falling off and not noticing it you really don't need to see your own car. The mirrors should be adjusted outwards so that you need to move your head at least 6"/20 cm to the right or left before you see the side of the car. Once you've done that drive slowly past a parked car and you'll see that the car appears in your peripheral vision just before it goes out of view in the mirror.
None of that works when you're on the freeway trying to merge one lane to the right and someone 2 lanes to the right of you is trying to merge one lane to the left.
Scanning mails for the benefit of the provider for advertising is not beneficial to the customer.
It's absolutely beneficial to the customer. It's what allows the customer to get top quality e-mail services for $0/month.
Seems to me Yahoo, MS, etc. offer free email services without scanning email contents to sell ads. And no, GMail isn't any better than either of those (nor is it more popular).
Somehow I doubt "federal wiretapping laws" take into account how much the person being tapped does or does not enjoy the results.
Scanning an email for viruses, to figure out who it goes to, to figure out if it's spam, to figure out if it's from a mailing list, to figure out if you intended to include an attachment, etc. are all core to delivering the functions users expect out of an email service, to securing and maintaining the service, etc. If the information is not stored (beyond typical backups - which also are done in order to maintain the service), not used for any other purpose, not normally accessible to other processes or people, etc., then it's fine.
Scanning and saving the contents to sell ads is not core to the service, is not necessary to maintain or secure the service, etc. It's the equivalent of Google fucking you in the ass (as is their normal procedure when harvesting and selling all your data outside of emails) and then reaching around not to tug on your dick / flick at your clit, but to aggressively yank on your nipple (sell the data in your private emails).
If I remember what I've read thirty years ago, Ctrl Alt Del was an IBM thing, not a Microsoft thing. An IBM engineer put it in as a debugging tool. If it had been deliberate it seems they would have used the SysReq key; in thirty years of using DOS and Windows I've never once seen that key used by any program, ever. SysReq would have been a better choice than alt-tab for switching programs when Windows came out, Ctrl-sysReq would have been superior to CtrlAltDel, and shift-SysReq would print the screen like it does now.
Is it irony or hypocricy that on my work machine, after you boot it you have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to log on, and again if the screen saver comes on? It's a really stupid, unergonomic and user-hostile design; move the mouse when the screen saver is on and rather than taking you to a login prompt like XP and 98 did, you get a screen instructing you to CtrlAltDel, only after you hit that does the login come on. It's a really stupid design, but that doesn't surprise me considering it's Microsoft.
Google would be a more complicated target for them, because a lot of their hardware, like servers, switches and routes was self designed.
Google's level of "designing" their own hardware is building a list of desired specs, picking a few parts, laying them out, then having someone in China stuff those parts in a box. Google doesn't design and fabricate the chips. That's where the NSA gets you.
Encrypting the connection between Google and the users isn't going to accomplish anything when the NSA already has full access to Google's servers.
Too little, too late. Way too late.
Google has been very adamant that the NSA does not have access to their servers. I don't know if I believe them or not but that is the premise Google is working off of.
It also means nothing when they cowtow to the national security letters like they do.
1: The NSA doesn't need access to Google's servers. They can MITM any connection that touches a major telco.
2: Google wouldn't even know if the NSA did have access to their servers. NSA has hardware-level backdoors in CPUs, NICs, etc., and of course they also employ meat-level espionage to get people on the inside.
So even if you took Google's statements as honest, they'd be worthless.
well, they botched whatever windows phone & mobile version they came up with. So your rule does not work in essence... BoB was retired after v1, xbox still does not make money, expedia might generate $20 million per year or so, whereas the ballmer v1 still comfortably loses billions and billions on a yearly basis (skype, nokia to close this list...).
I don't know how you didn't mention Zune or Kin. (To be fair, Zunes are great hardware, and the Kin was a patent portfolio move with a "Throw shit at the wall hope it sticks" marketing push.)
microsoft has made a ton of money on the xbox(and that is net). with the xbox 360 having the highest software attach rate of any console in history at 7.5(xbox 360), compaired to 3.8(PS3) and 3.5(wii). not to mention they make a ton of money from xbox live membership costs.
And it's pathetic to talk about 360 attach rates when 80% of 360 owners are on their second (or third, or fourth, or worse) console. Regardless, your attach rate numbers are wrong, as is your history (the 8-bit and 16-bit generations had much higher attach rates).
No, the adage is that you shouldn't bother trying to make a better mousetrap. The original design is pretty much optimal as far as killing mice goes.
Except it's not. Plenty of mice and rats are smart enough to not trigger the traps. Not only do you not kill the mice, you end up feeding them a delicious snack.
Slashdot Mirror
How: Anyone can get on Tor, get on Silk Road, and watch what's going on. Anonymity doesn't do shit when half the nodes are run by three letter acronyms and you end up selling BTC on MtGox for USD.
The only questions I have have are about the seizure and the hacking.
How do you seize BTC? Surely they had an encrypted wallet and copious backups, right? The feds can take your wallet and do exactly nothing with it, while you could then reproduce your wallet from one of your backups and have instant access to your BTC.
Why was he hit with a hacking charge? Because he did things with a computer?
It's Project Gutenb*e*rg
And that's what I initially typed. I had to force myself to copy Gutenburg from the summary.
The summary doesn't even mention the researcher's name? I mean, I agree that this is useless, pointless "research". But if you're going to piss about and drop Project Gutenburg and "Google Books Corpus" which are only tangentially related, couldn't you at least give "this guy" a fucking name?
HL1 was great.
HL2 was okay. Episode 1 was poop. Episode 2 was okay.
HL3 will suck.
It all makes sense, of course. With each Half Life there's only half of the original(ity) left.
Here's a visual representation of what I'd do to fix it. (Not a joke/goatse/troll.)
http://i.imgur.com/rNPke5p.jpg
I am so fucking sick of the "image with rectangle overlay so we can put text on top of it" theme.
If your image isn't indicative of your content, it doesn't belong there. Get rid of the image and just use text for your headline.
If it is indicative of your content, don't cover up half of it with a semi-transparent rectangle with text and icons in it. Put the text above the image.
Furthermore, shoving multiple images together so that they actually adjoin when they represent separate content is retarded. Even if you want to adopt the "flat, sharp, "modern"" style (really, the Windows 8 "formerly-known-as-Metro" style), you should use the space you have.
I've got a 1280x1024 window for you to work with (minus scroll bars). This has been bog standard for a decade. There's no reason I should be looking at a filmstrip of content that's 600px wide and off center, with 3 adjoining images in a 560px wide square, each 50% covered by a white rectangle with text.
Furthermore, the bottom left image links to Story B but the bottom left semi-transparent rectangle links to nothing (it only the text links), and the bottom right image ALSO links to Story B, when it should link to Story C (the text for Image C does link to Story C).
not because the company distrusts NIST, but because its executives are worried about the NSA's influence on NIST's development of ciphers in the last couple of decades.
If "executives are worried about the NSA's influence on NIST's development of ciphers in the last couple of decades" then "the company distrusts NIST".
Actually one way to define NP is that the solutions can be verified in polynomial time; although the complexity class is usually defined in terms of a universal turing machine.
I think you might be confusing NP with NP-hard.
That's not "one way to define NP" unless you want to define it incorrectly.
I'm not confusing anything. OP talked in general about NP and got it very wrong. You can't verify a solutions to all NP problems in polynomial time.
you should review the definition of NP
You should probably review my post.
You cannot say that solutions to NP problems can be verified in polynomial time on a classical computer. That's only true for a subset of NP problems. Typically, anything dealing with "Find the shortest/cheapest/<whatever>est <whatever> that satisfies <whatever>" will still be NP on verification. These tend to be similar to problems we deal with in the real world.
For an NP problem, if the QC gives you the answer you can verify the answer in polynomial time on an *ordinary* computer.
Depends on the problem. You can't verify solutions to many graph problems without mapping out every possible path, for example.
If a quantum computer makes a calculation in a forest and no one is around to verify it, does it solve the problem?
No, but Google will push it out as a staggered update anyway and silently tweak it for 2 years before pulling the whole thing and telling people to use the new Quantum tab on Google+.
Sandy was a tropical storm. Not a hurricane. No, there wasn't anything "super" about it.
Pet Peeve
If you have a blind spot your mirrors are adjusted wrong. Every Drivers Education course teaches students to adjust the mirrors so that the driver can see the side of the car, but unless you're worried about a quarter-panel falling off and not noticing it you really don't need to see your own car. The mirrors should be adjusted outwards so that you need to move your head at least 6"/20 cm to the right or left before you see the side of the car. Once you've done that drive slowly past a parked car and you'll see that the car appears in your peripheral vision just before it goes out of view in the mirror.
None of that works when you're on the freeway trying to merge one lane to the right and someone 2 lanes to the right of you is trying to merge one lane to the left.
Scanning mails for the benefit of the provider for advertising is not beneficial to the customer.
It's absolutely beneficial to the customer. It's what allows the customer to get top quality e-mail services for $0/month.
Seems to me Yahoo, MS, etc. offer free email services without scanning email contents to sell ads.
And no, GMail isn't any better than either of those (nor is it more popular).
Somehow I doubt "federal wiretapping laws" take into account how much the person being tapped does or does not enjoy the results.
Scanning an email for viruses, to figure out who it goes to, to figure out if it's spam, to figure out if it's from a mailing list, to figure out if you intended to include an attachment, etc. are all core to delivering the functions users expect out of an email service, to securing and maintaining the service, etc. If the information is not stored (beyond typical backups - which also are done in order to maintain the service), not used for any other purpose, not normally accessible to other processes or people, etc., then it's fine.
Scanning and saving the contents to sell ads is not core to the service, is not necessary to maintain or secure the service, etc. It's the equivalent of Google fucking you in the ass (as is their normal procedure when harvesting and selling all your data outside of emails) and then reaching around not to tug on your dick / flick at your clit, but to aggressively yank on your nipple (sell the data in your private emails).
If people post stuff on an online social media site, aren't they giving permission to publish it online?
Minor cannot legally enter into a contract. By the virtue of this, they cannot give legally binding consent to anything.
Wrong. Minors can and do legally enter into contracts. It's just very easy for them to get out of them when they hit 18.
If I remember what I've read thirty years ago, Ctrl Alt Del was an IBM thing, not a Microsoft thing. An IBM engineer put it in as a debugging tool. If it had been deliberate it seems they would have used the SysReq key; in thirty years of using DOS and Windows I've never once seen that key used by any program, ever. SysReq would have been a better choice than alt-tab for switching programs when Windows came out, Ctrl-sysReq would have been superior to CtrlAltDel, and shift-SysReq would print the screen like it does now.
Is it irony or hypocricy that on my work machine, after you boot it you have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to log on, and again if the screen saver comes on? It's a really stupid, unergonomic and user-hostile design; move the mouse when the screen saver is on and rather than taking you to a login prompt like XP and 98 did, you get a screen instructing you to CtrlAltDel, only after you hit that does the login come on. It's a really stupid design, but that doesn't surprise me considering it's Microsoft.
CTRL+ALT+DEL serves as a SAK - secure attention key. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_attention_key
It's a security feature (which you can disable if you want).
Google would be a more complicated target for them, because a lot of their hardware, like servers, switches and routes was self designed.
Google's level of "designing" their own hardware is building a list of desired specs, picking a few parts, laying them out, then having someone in China stuff those parts in a box. Google doesn't design and fabricate the chips. That's where the NSA gets you.
The best nap is the one where you wake up to an eager mouth on your genitals, just as you orgasm.
Encrypting the connection between Google and the users isn't going to accomplish anything when the NSA already has full access to Google's servers.
Too little, too late. Way too late.
Google has been very adamant that the NSA does not have access to their servers. I don't know if I believe them or not but that is the premise Google is working off of.
It also means nothing when they cowtow to the national security letters like they do.
1: The NSA doesn't need access to Google's servers. They can MITM any connection that touches a major telco.
2: Google wouldn't even know if the NSA did have access to their servers. NSA has hardware-level backdoors in CPUs, NICs, etc., and of course they also employ meat-level espionage to get people on the inside.
So even if you took Google's statements as honest, they'd be worthless.
well, they botched whatever windows phone & mobile version they came up with. So your rule does not work in essence...
BoB was retired after v1, xbox still does not make money, expedia might generate $20 million per year or so, whereas the ballmer v1 still comfortably loses billions and billions on a yearly basis (skype, nokia to close this list...).
I don't know how you didn't mention Zune or Kin.
(To be fair, Zunes are great hardware, and the Kin was a patent portfolio move with a "Throw shit at the wall hope it sticks" marketing push.)
microsoft has made a ton of money on the xbox(and that is net). with the xbox 360 having the highest software attach rate of any console in history at 7.5(xbox 360), compaired to 3.8(PS3) and 3.5(wii). not to mention they make a ton of money from xbox live membership costs.
Wrong. http://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-xbox-division-has-lost-nearly-3-billion-in-10-years
Microsoft's Gaming Division is in the hole to the tune of $3,000,000,000.00.
And it's pathetic to talk about 360 attach rates when 80% of 360 owners are on their second (or third, or fourth, or worse) console. Regardless, your attach rate numbers are wrong, as is your history (the 8-bit and 16-bit generations had much higher attach rates).
No, she yiffed.
No, the adage is that you shouldn't bother trying to make a better mousetrap. The original design is pretty much optimal as far as killing mice goes.
Except it's not. Plenty of mice and rats are smart enough to not trigger the traps. Not only do you not kill the mice, you end up feeding them a delicious snack.
Try reading the post. I included detecting being over friendly ground as well as preventing midair detonation.
But this is slashdot.