Yes, the transaction time matters. There are cutoffs times for shipping, and a three hour payment delay can easily make a day of difference on when you get your kit. You might not "feel" that with wait-a-week shipping, but you definitely feel it with next-day and two-day deals.
If you want to use your BTC for day to day transactions it's worse. Remember the 10,000 BTC pizza? Do you want to wait hours for your pizza transaction to confirm?
The transparency breaks in exchanges like BTC-E, MtGox, etc. Money goes in one address and pops out another clean as a whistle. That's why the SEC, FTC, and DOJ want visibility into those.
I don't see BTC as a real competitor to Paypal, Visa, or Mastercard for one big reasons. The transaction confirmation time _sucks_ and is unpredictable.
I bought some kit with BTC from Overstock and it took hours to confirm in the blockchain even though I put a fat fee on it. That's rubbish compared to a PayPal or CC transaction that is "slow" if it takes 30 seconds.
The network needs to dramatically increase the block rate if it's going to compete in that space. To me the static 10-minute-per-block target rate was the only major shortsighted design decision Ms. Satoshi made.
>> It's not the security theater so much as the inefficiency that bothers everyone.
I respectfully disagree. It's the theater. I could forgive inefficiency if it were effective, but it's not. We're 15 years post-911, and the hands-in-bag screeners still don't get to see an image of what made the x-ray screener pull the bag.
Nail-clipper treasure hunts make us less safe because it trains agents to look for clippers. IMHO we need a lot more red team exercises, multiple per airport day, and a lot less nail-clipper policing. $0.02.
well I think that's the problem. They don't have the paper.
Here is an interesting data point. Last year John Oliver's Last week tonight tv show wanted to do a deep dive into collection agencies. They formed a collection agency and bought literally millions of dollars in medical debt. You would think that this debt would be handed off as thousands of pounds of paperwork or gigabytes of scanned documents.
You'd be wrong. They bought an excel spreadsheet of names, addresses, social security numbers, etc.
"Ask for proof of the debt" appears to be a valid strategy to check abuses in the collection industry.
if it's in the manufacturer's financial interest to put the driver at fault, what's to stop a less-than-scrupulous auto manufacturer from "doctoring" the automobile's driving logs
You are right, it is a concern. How does enterprise IT prevent log tampering? Aside from getting the logs off of the box as quickly as possible?
> I have this faint, fleeting notion that Tesla software is never going to log a problem that implicates itself.
Your notion is incorrect. They have cooperated fully in several crashes, including one where the autopilot system failed to recognize an illegally turning truck and resulted in a fatality and one where the autopilot failed to understand construction road markings and sideswiped a construction barrier.
Humans are really awful drivers making the bar extremely low for AI to beat us at this. Neither Tesla or Google/Waymo need a thumb on the scale to demonstrate that.
I thought I'd miss the start menu, but I don't. If I'm going to launch something I either have it pinned to the taskbar or hit the window-key, type three letters for it to pop up in the search, and to launch it. I remember using the start menu once in the last month because I couldn't remember the name of the Autodesk 3-d STL tool (meshmixer).
When I go back to XP machines I feel clumsy having to click for things.
(I am employed by Microsoft. This is my own opinion and not something they pay me to say.
What drives me literally to drink is when IT departments don't properly manage and upgrade their "security" software.
I'm working with a customer now that is two years behind on updating the version of their enterprise antivirus software. Literally half of the BSOD crashes on desktops at this company are a known bug that's fixed in newer versions of their AV.
The other half of the BSODs are mostly Intel Wireless and Video driver bugs that have also been fixed. There has to be a better way to manage these than "Hey, this driver is crashing let's go check the manufacturer website."
>> Maybe it is obvious to Americans, but what is proof of funds? Isn't the $50k cash a credible proof of itself ?
That's not what he means. In Soviet America, the police can and do seize large amounts of money from people in traffic stops if those people do not have credible proof that the funds are from legitimate sources.
This is called "Civil Forfeiture" and is designed to take money out of the drug trade. If your funds are seized it can take months or years and multiple court hearings to regain them. It is an extremely controversial practice and my opinion is that it should be outlawed.
> Serious question, is there something I should be doing different to keep these XP machines from becoming a security problem?
Don't have them be a member of your domain, Have unique passwords on them, don't access the internet from them, don't check email on them, and don't allow internet access on them.
There is still the possibility that they'll be compromised in a lateral traversal attack, but this minimizes the probability that they'll be the initial attack vector.
>> autocomplete is what's broken and correcting mistakes doesn't work because when you backspace something, it thinks you're starting a new word from that position.
Yes, Swype fixes this for me. Try the free trial, you'll thank me later.:D
> I still can't get the darn thing to type right, the autocomplete is horrendous
I had a ZTE android phone with a terrible keyboard. That's when I figured out that OEMs change the keyboard and some of them are real shite. The Samsung one is a lot better. The nice thing about android is you can switch it out if you don't like it. I use Gboard (free/google) or Swiftkey (free or $0.99) everywhere now.
>> I compile my own versions of Android without Google CrapStore. Have you tried doing this with IOS? Do they support embedded development on their kit at all?
No. iTunes is truly awful software. Basic operations like copying pictures or music are a painful chore with it. Customers pay me to put up with that crap and I won't spend my time or money on it.
For $120 I can get a Samsung Galaxy Express Prime 2 with the same size screen as an iPhone 7, a removable battery, Headphone jack, and a MicroSD slot. Best of all, if I want to sync my music to it I can drag-and-drop the folder into the phone or sync them with Dropbox.
My dumbass brother in law is in prison and deserves to be there. For him to call us costs $8 for a 10 minute call. Loading $20 onto the phone account through an automated voice prompt system charges a $3 fee too.
It's an abuse of power. Even worse, crime correlates strongly with poverty, so it's an abuse against those that can literally least afford it.
I can't help but feel that we could lower prison violence and criminal recidivism if we treated prisoners like human beings instead of animals.
That NaK moderator is some terrifying stuff. It's a eutectic mixture that's a liquid at room temperature and will spontaneously combust from the moisture in earth air.
I'm stunned they let that fly. Excited, but stunned.:)
The scary thing about SNAP-10A is that it's been exposed to decades of bombardment by micrometeorites. It's been shedding parts, literally falling apart, for decades. Using it for parts, ignoring the fact that much of its fuel has decayed to uselessness, means getting close to it to see how bad it is.
We should ask the Russians for advice. They flew their TOPAZ reactors successfully.
It's not the man; it's the paperwork. Literally half of the cost of building a new reactor (even a test reactor) goes to regulatory approvals.
My state is home to the Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station. Construction started on this facility in 1973, and the first reactor was completed in 1996. The second reactor didn't come online until 2016, and it was the first new power-generation reactor to light up in 20 years.
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Yes, the transaction time matters. There are cutoffs times for shipping, and a three hour payment delay can easily make a day of difference on when you get your kit. You might not "feel" that with wait-a-week shipping, but you definitely feel it with next-day and two-day deals.
If you want to use your BTC for day to day transactions it's worse. Remember the 10,000 BTC pizza? Do you want to wait hours for your pizza transaction to confirm?
The transparency breaks in exchanges like BTC-E, MtGox, etc. Money goes in one address and pops out another clean as a whistle. That's why the SEC, FTC, and DOJ want visibility into those.
The nice beaches are in Crimea.
Really, they are. :)
BTC true believer here.
I don't see BTC as a real competitor to Paypal, Visa, or Mastercard for one big reasons. The transaction confirmation time _sucks_ and is unpredictable.
I bought some kit with BTC from Overstock and it took hours to confirm in the blockchain even though I put a fat fee on it. That's rubbish compared to a PayPal or CC transaction that is "slow" if it takes 30 seconds.
The network needs to dramatically increase the block rate if it's going to compete in that space. To me the static 10-minute-per-block target rate was the only major shortsighted design decision Ms. Satoshi made.
>> It's not the security theater so much as the inefficiency that bothers everyone.
I respectfully disagree. It's the theater. I could forgive inefficiency if it were effective, but it's not. We're 15 years post-911, and the hands-in-bag screeners still don't get to see an image of what made the x-ray screener pull the bag.
Nail-clipper treasure hunts make us less safe because it trains agents to look for clippers. IMHO we need a lot more red team exercises, multiple per airport day, and a lot less nail-clipper policing. $0.02.
Here is an interesting data point. Last year John Oliver's Last week tonight tv show wanted to do a deep dive into collection agencies. They formed a collection agency and bought literally millions of dollars in medical debt. You would think that this debt would be handed off as thousands of pounds of paperwork or gigabytes of scanned documents.
You'd be wrong. They bought an excel spreadsheet of names, addresses, social security numbers, etc.
"Ask for proof of the debt" appears to be a valid strategy to check abuses in the collection industry.
if it's in the manufacturer's financial interest to put the driver at fault, what's to stop a less-than-scrupulous auto manufacturer from "doctoring" the automobile's driving logs
You are right, it is a concern. How does enterprise IT prevent log tampering? Aside from getting the logs off of the box as quickly as possible?
> I have this faint, fleeting notion that Tesla software is never going to log a problem that implicates itself.
Your notion is incorrect. They have cooperated fully in several crashes, including one where the autopilot system failed to recognize an illegally turning truck and resulted in a fatality and one where the autopilot failed to understand construction road markings and sideswiped a construction barrier.
Humans are really awful drivers making the bar extremely low for AI to beat us at this. Neither Tesla or Google/Waymo need a thumb on the scale to demonstrate that.
I thought I'd miss the start menu, but I don't. If I'm going to launch something I either have it pinned to the taskbar or hit the window-key, type three letters for it to pop up in the search, and to launch it. I remember using the start menu once in the last month because I couldn't remember the name of the Autodesk 3-d STL tool (meshmixer).
When I go back to XP machines I feel clumsy having to click for things.
(I am employed by Microsoft. This is my own opinion and not something they pay me to say.
The Art of electronics manages not to start with this, and it has a non-trivial amount of math in it.
What drives me literally to drink is when IT departments don't properly manage and upgrade their "security" software.
I'm working with a customer now that is two years behind on updating the version of their enterprise antivirus software. Literally half of the BSOD crashes on desktops at this company are a known bug that's fixed in newer versions of their AV.
The other half of the BSODs are mostly Intel Wireless and Video driver bugs that have also been fixed. There has to be a better way to manage these than "Hey, this driver is crashing let's go check the manufacturer website."
>> Maybe it is obvious to Americans, but what is proof of funds? Isn't the $50k cash a credible proof of itself ?
That's not what he means. In Soviet America, the police can and do seize large amounts of money from people in traffic stops if those people do not have credible proof that the funds are from legitimate sources.
This is called "Civil Forfeiture" and is designed to take money out of the drug trade. If your funds are seized it can take months or years and multiple court hearings to regain them. It is an extremely controversial practice and my opinion is that it should be outlawed.
>What's left?
OTTOMH, Disk Encryption, Data loss protection, Solidcore, and a bunch of Enterprise security tools.
You've never had the UI go unresponsive in X11 under heavy load?
> Serious question, is there something I should be doing different to keep these XP machines from becoming a security problem?
Don't have them be a member of your domain, Have unique passwords on them, don't access the internet from them, don't check email on them, and don't allow internet access on them.
There is still the possibility that they'll be compromised in a lateral traversal attack, but this minimizes the probability that they'll be the initial attack vector.
>> autocomplete is what's broken and correcting mistakes doesn't work because when you backspace something, it thinks you're starting a new word from that position.
Yes, Swype fixes this for me. Try the free trial, you'll thank me later. :D
> I still can't get the darn thing to type right, the autocomplete is horrendous
I had a ZTE android phone with a terrible keyboard. That's when I figured out that OEMs change the keyboard and some of them are real shite. The Samsung one is a lot better. The nice thing about android is you can switch it out if you don't like it. I use Gboard (free/google) or Swiftkey (free or $0.99) everywhere now.
>> I compile my own versions of Android without Google CrapStore.
Have you tried doing this with IOS? Do they support embedded development on their kit at all?
No. iTunes is truly awful software. Basic operations like copying pictures or music are a painful chore with it. Customers pay me to put up with that crap and I won't spend my time or money on it.
For $120 I can get a Samsung Galaxy Express Prime 2 with the same size screen as an iPhone 7, a removable battery, Headphone jack, and a MicroSD slot. Best of all, if I want to sync my music to it I can drag-and-drop the folder into the phone or sync them with Dropbox.
Fuck iTunes and the phones that require it.
Mod parent up, +4 isn't high enough.
My dumbass brother in law is in prison and deserves to be there. For him to call us costs $8 for a 10 minute call. Loading $20 onto the phone account through an automated voice prompt system charges a $3 fee too.
It's an abuse of power. Even worse, crime correlates strongly with poverty, so it's an abuse against those that can literally least afford it.
I can't help but feel that we could lower prison violence and criminal recidivism if we treated prisoners like human beings instead of animals.
Mod parent up for link to hilarious video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That NaK moderator is some terrifying stuff. It's a eutectic mixture that's a liquid at room temperature and will spontaneously combust from the moisture in earth air.
I'm stunned they let that fly. Excited, but stunned. :)
Apex predators, like humans, rarely see an extinction level event coming. It's not an exercise in flag planting; It's about redundancy.
You back up your porn to keep it safe, right? I want to make a backup of human civilization.
Don't ignore the radioactive bits of coal ash. A coal plant literally releases more radiation than operating a nuclear plant.
The scary thing about SNAP-10A is that it's been exposed to decades of bombardment by micrometeorites. It's been shedding parts, literally falling apart, for decades. Using it for parts, ignoring the fact that much of its fuel has decayed to uselessness, means getting close to it to see how bad it is.
We should ask the Russians for advice. They flew their TOPAZ reactors successfully.
It's not the man; it's the paperwork. Literally half of the cost of building a new reactor (even a test reactor) goes to regulatory approvals.
My state is home to the Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station. Construction started on this facility in 1973, and the first reactor was completed in 1996. The second reactor didn't come online until 2016, and it was the first new power-generation reactor to light up in 20 years.