What you describe is not a pyramid scheme, it is a run on the bank. That is precisely what Bitcoin is going through.
No, that's what Mt. Gox will go through when they come back on line, and there's a scramble to get money out. We're about to find out if Mt. Gox really has all the funds on deposit with them.
Mt. Gox customers are screaming on forums about getting a message from Mt. Gox that says "The password for this account is invalid, or this account is not currently under claim process."
The Bitcoin thing has gone off in a different direction than its promoters anticipated. They were thinking "payment system", like gift cards. The idea was that most Bitcoins would be tied up in people's "wallets", and spent slowly. All that static value would anchor the currency.
That's not what happened. Bitcoins turned into a speculative vehicle, with "miners" grinding away solving hashes and generating more Bitcoins, and flaky "exchanges" offering on-line trading. The exchanges are tiny; today's worldwide Bitcoin trading volume is comparable to the sales of one supermarket. The daily volatility is huge, even on days when there isn't a break-in. So no major retailer can accept Bitcoins; they don't know what they will be worth at the end of the day, let alone the end of the month.
In a speculator-dominated system, Bitcoins are a pyramid scheme. The scheme by which it becomes harder over time to generate Bitcoins favored early adopters by a huge margin.
It's already too late to get in. The difficulty level has reached the point where buying and powering the new hardware is not cost-effective. And that was before the price of Bitcoins crashed. (The current price is around $13.)
Then there's the flaky exchange problem. Mt. Gox (formerly Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange) turns out to be two people in Tokyo. Tradehill is some company in Chile. All the other exchanges are too dinky to matter. Not one of them has the organization and resources of a typical small-town bank. Worse, they're not just "exchanges". They're depositary institutions, holding customer balances. Mt. Gox customers are now very aware of this, because they can't get at their money while Mt. Gox is down. Some people are worried over whether the money will be there when Mt. Gox comes back up.
The "exchanges" represent a mis-design of Bitcoin. There should have been a way to do an exchange in a distributed way, without the exchange holding customer assets. The NYSE and NASDAQ don't hold customer balances. Brokers do, but you can have your cash swept from a brokerage into a bank daily, or more often if the numbers get big. The Bitcoin exchanges are slow at delivering money - Mt. Gox has a daily transfer limit, and even when they were up, many users reported delays.
Ah, the C++ committee. They've added lots of l33t features, and haven't fixed any of the safety problems. You can still get raw pointers. You still sometimes need them. The language-level arrays are still unsized, like C, and there will still be buffer overflows. (Yes, if you do everything the "C++ way", buffer overflows are much less likely. Now try to use the Linux API. There are too many places where the programmer has to be "very careful". People who think that's OK should be put on maintenance programming for a year.)
C++ remains the only major language with hiding ("abstraction") but without pointer safety.
With TradeHill back up and running for a few hours, there's now a functioning Bitcoin market. For a few hours, there was a huge spread between bid and ask prices, and thus few trades. Now the spread has tightened up, and price seems to have settled down around $11.90/BTC. The market remains thin; selling a few hundred bitcoins would crash the market.
It's a dinky market by any standard. The total volume at TradeHill, under $20,000 today, is comparable to a big gas station or a supermarket.
I can't see how they spent $200 million on that turkey. There aren't that many sets, and the big ones are obviously green-screen work. The alien city (?) is so fuzzy that it looks like bad video game art.
The hero is a jerk. The villain is pointless. The Green Lantern corps meeting looks like a Nazi rally, fist-raising and all.
Wait for the DVD, coming to a bargain bin near you soon. Maybe this will kill off the second-tier comic superhero genre for a while.
Since after the EMP bombs all go off, no one's eReaders are gonna be working all that well anymore.
Back in the 1950s, there was an Civil Defense effort to collect the information necessary to start up an industrial society. The info was copies to microfilm and placed in major fallout shelters, along with some simple microfilm viewers.
I'd really like to find a copy of those microfilms.
There's no Bitcoin market right now.
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 4, Informative
Look at those tiny volumes. Total volume for all the little guys is under 0.1% of Mt. Gox, which was trading over 200,000 bitcoins per day. With Mt. Gox and TradeHill off-line, the market is dead. None of those little guys have any significant buyers available.
The money transferred out of the exchange is gone and MtGox IS going to eat the losses, and do a proper rollback.
The question is 1) do they have the cash to do that, and 2) do they have their own cash to do that, as opposed to taking it from the accounts of their customers (see Madoff, Bernie). This is why depository institutions need outside audits.
There's a lot we don't know about Mt. Gox. Do they trade Bitcoins themselves? The value of Bitcoins is way down from the peak; does Mt. Gox have a problem with losses? After a screwup like this, it's necessary to ask those questions.
As for "personal integrity", the operator of Mt. Gox is anonymous. What personal integrity?
It's worse than that. Very flaky players
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Mt. Gox", the main Bitcoin exchange, was originally "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange". Nobody really knows who runs "Mt. Gox"; it appears to be one person in Tokyo who's only reachable via email and IRC. (He must be having a terrible night; this all happened around 3AM in Japan.) It's not like there's some real financial institution, or even a funded start-up, behind this. Most, if not all, of the Bitcoin "exchanges" and "exchangers" are somewhat flaky entities. Bitcoin's ecosystem is financially very weak.
Understand that Mt. Gox is not just an exchange. It's a depository institution, like a bank. Customers have balances, in Bitcoins and other currencies, with Mt. Gox. But Mt. Gox is not regulated or audited as a bank or a brokerage, even though it holds other people's money. Accounts are uninsured.
This matters when something goes wrong and somebody gets stuck with losses. Mt. Gox claims they're going to "roll back" transactions to before the theft. But some of the money is already gone, transferred out before Mt. Gox shut down. Mt. Gox is going to have to eat some of those losses if they do a rollback. Do they have the cash? Nobody knows. They're not audited by anybody.
As for the security breach, not only is the entire file of usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords now widely available, so are the unencrypted passwords cracked so far. (One wonders why whomever stole the password file published it, but it may have to do with their needing help from others to crack the passwords.) As a result, TradeHill, another Bitcoin exchange based in Chile, has shut down, to avoid attacks using passwords obtained from Mt. Gox. Right now, there's no way to turn Bitcoins into dollars. (Euros, yes; right now the going rate is EUR11.51/BTC. But that market is very thin.)
Whether or not BItcoins are a good idea, the market ecosystem behind them is far too flaky.
This process is called neutron activation analysis. It's well known. The practical problems are 1) not putting in so many neutrons that the tested object becomes radioactive, and 2) detecting enough emitted particles in a reasonable length of time. There's an obvious tradeoff there. The second problem is solvable with a large number of detectors, which probably means a portal or tunnel setup, rather than a hand-held device.
Here's a commercial luggage screening machine from Russia which includes nuclear material detection by neutron activation, along with regular explosive detection.
The reason we don't have compatibility is that the sellers have more power than the buyers. When sellers are many and weak, as in desktop PCs, compatibility is good.
In aerospace, compatibility is made to work. There's a specification, and both sides of an interface must conform to the specification. That's why you can unbolt a Pratt and Whitney engine from a 747, bolt on a Rolls Royce engine, and go fly. In telephony, you can buy many basic components from a number of suppliers. Phone compatibility with cellular networks is technically a tougher problem than JavaScript compatibility, yet carriers make the phone manufacturers and cell site manufacturers interoperate properly.
The Chevy Volt inherently has a complex use cycle. It can be plugged in for slow charge, fast charged, or fueled. Heating and air conditioning use matters a lot. So do hills. Info about the use cycle is needed to figure out the tradeoffs. Would adding 50% more battery capacity be a win or a lose? What about if battery prices dropped 20%?
The Volt's software notices if the gasoline engine isn't needed for 6 weeks or so, and prompts the driver to run the engine briefly, so it gets warmed up and rotated. If there's almost no fuel use in a year, it prompts you to run the engine and add some fresh gasoline (there's a shelf life problem). How many drivers hit those limits? Nobody knows yet.
Some technologies die because they require a substantial infrastructure to sustain them. Kodachrome is a recent example. The special dyes, the factory that made then, and the elaborate, specialized processing labs are all gone now.
Steam locomotives are getting there. They require a major overhaul every 100,000 miles or so, and the massive infrastructure needed for that is long gone. There are people restoring the things as hobbyist projects, but they're taking a decade to do a job that a proper shop once did in a week. (Yes, I know about Tornado. It took them 19 years to build one locomotive, and when it had a boiler problem, they had to ship the thing to Germany for repairs.)
There's a lot of dead technology in the amplifier area. Before electronic amplifiers, there were decades of kludges, built to desperately try to make a big signal from a little one. The Teleharmonium in the original article was an example. They couldn't amplify audio, so they had to generate enough power at the head end to drive every speaker in the system. Each note had its own sizable AC generator, which is how they got to 200 tons of gear. Edison's "chalk telephone", the electromotograph, was an early amplifier Bell Telephone used electromagnetic speaker coils driving resistive carbon button transmitters as amplifiers. There are a number of mechanical amplifier types based on friction clutches. There were amplifiers based on electrical rotating machinery, like amplidynes and Ward-Leonard drives. All of these sucked so bad that they were discarded once tubes and power semiconductors became available.
(OK, Ward-Leonard drives live on. If you get into an elevator, and it's not moving but you hear a sizable motor running, that's a Ward-Leonard speed control, 1890 technology. It's an AC motor driving a DC generator, with the field current on the DC generator being adjusted to control speed. This has the advantage that the flywheel on the drive provides some of the energy for starting the elevator, and peak current is reduced.)
Amazon needs to run submitted eBooks through TurnItIn to check for plagiarism. Otherwise, they're involved in copyright infringement for profit, which is a felony in the US.
*Corn* ethanol was always a boondoggle, brought to you by lobbyists and innumerate politicians who were unable to understand or care about the concept of EREOI.
Right. The ethanol subsidy applied to the output of ethanol plants that used other fuels to run the distillation process. So unsubsidized natural gas went in and subsidized ethanol came out. In some cases this was a net energy loss. If ethanol plants were required to be self-powering (as most oil refineries are), and there was no subsidy for energy consumed in the process, it wouldn't be so bad.
"Sports fans" are pathetic. People who actually participate in sports are fine. I've spent lots of time in gyms and on horseback, and the jerk level is relatively low. The bar and club crowd, even when drunk, is seldom more than annoying.
But crowds of drunk oinkers leaving a stadium act like they're entitled to make trouble. Then they try to drive. I'm for running everybody leaving the stadium through a blood alcohol test and dumping the drunks into holding pens until they're fit to rejoin society.
Re:Pretty impressive all things considered!
on
IBM Turns 100
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· Score: 1
Also, don't forget that IBM is one of the only companies big enough to put serious money into research anymore. In my mind, that's really important. Where are all the CS, physics and EE Ph. D's going to work now that Bell Labs is gone and HP only does product research?
IBM Research is a shadow of what it once was. I happened to be up at IBM's Almaden Research Center the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was not a happy day.
The actual article is more along the lines of "We're going to port all our crappy but popular apps like Farmville from Flash to JavaScript to get onto the iPhone."
Of course you follow the money. There aren't that many spammers; about three years ago, there seemed to be only about ten unique large-scale spammers. Taking one of them down made a significant dent in spam traffic for a month.
Junky spam and junky bogus web sites are obsolete, even in the criminal world. The old mindset was to filter out emails and sites that "looked junky". The old "Web Spam Challenge was based on this. They have a big file of pages which humans have classified, by a quick look, as "spam" or "not spam". Five or ten years ago, that sort of worked, because most of the junk sites were really tacky. Phishing sites used to have blatant misspellings. That's history. Today's crooks have good web site production values.
So you have to dig deeper. On the web spam/bogus web site front, part of the right answer is to find out who's behind the web site and do a background check. (We do that at SiteTruth.com, as I've mentioned before.) Right now, even a superficial check (is there a mailing address on the site? Is it a known phishing site? Do seals of approval check out? Non-junk SSL cert?) is enough to knock out a big fraction of the junk. The deeper checks (is there a business at that address? How long in business? How much revenue last year? What's their business credit rating?) tell us enough to have some confidence about business legitimacy.
The original article mentions "ordering tons of stuff from phishing scams to trace the path of the money." That's what the FBI should be doing more of. Law enforcement can have accounts created, plug into the credit card system, and watch their credit cards being used in real time. It's hard to do that without law enforcement authority.
There's more than high speed rail going on. China is building an inter-provincial expressway system, too. The interior provinces aren't sharing in the prosperity of the coastal ones. Better roads and better freight rail will help. Historically, China discouraged inter-provincial trade, and each province was expected to be self-sufficient. That's still to some extent true, and there's some internal friction over eliminating internal trade restrictions. They won't survive a really good highway system.
The history of the US Interstate Highway System isn't quite applicable, though. Every state has at least one interstate highway, and most have at least two. That's a consequence of how Congress is set up. China's transportation system is thin in the western portion of the country.
Russia has their own problems. When communism went down, they had a power vacuum, which was filled by organized crime. For a while, Russia had rule by "oligarchs". Putin managed to get the biggest oligarchs under control, the ones big enough to challenge national power. But there are still too many crooks per capita left, and they tend to be too closely tied to parts of the Government.
This is why we have so much trouble with various computer attacks out of Russia. Some are private, some may be actual military intrusions, and some may be private parties trying to get info they can sell to the military.
Bear in mind that Russia (and many third world countries) have little private fiefdoms within their military. Generals running profit-making businesses on the side isn't at all unusual in much of the world, especially when the military is better organized than the rest of the country. (This is a disease of countries with too big a military and not enough for them to do. The US military is so busy nobody has time for that nonsense. Homeland Security, though...)
but was turned off by the amateurish and non-reputable state of current exchanges. There are no guarantees, no safeguards, no oversight, no insurance, and no straightforward way for me to establish the credibility of any of these exchanges.
Exactly. Some of those "exchanges" are unregulated depository institutions. That's where the term "Ponzi scheme" applies. You really wonder if they actually have the assets. Especially when there are so many obstacles to getting money out.
Slashdot Mirror
What you describe is not a pyramid scheme, it is a run on the bank. That is precisely what Bitcoin is going through.
No, that's what Mt. Gox will go through when they come back on line, and there's a scramble to get money out. We're about to find out if Mt. Gox really has all the funds on deposit with them.
Mt. Gox customers are screaming on forums about getting a message from Mt. Gox that says "The password for this account is invalid, or this account is not currently under claim process."
e-Gold was shut down in 2009, and the claims process still hasn't released funds.
The Bitcoin thing has gone off in a different direction than its promoters anticipated. They were thinking "payment system", like gift cards. The idea was that most Bitcoins would be tied up in people's "wallets", and spent slowly. All that static value would anchor the currency.
That's not what happened. Bitcoins turned into a speculative vehicle, with "miners" grinding away solving hashes and generating more Bitcoins, and flaky "exchanges" offering on-line trading. The exchanges are tiny; today's worldwide Bitcoin trading volume is comparable to the sales of one supermarket. The daily volatility is huge, even on days when there isn't a break-in. So no major retailer can accept Bitcoins; they don't know what they will be worth at the end of the day, let alone the end of the month.
In a speculator-dominated system, Bitcoins are a pyramid scheme. The scheme by which it becomes harder over time to generate Bitcoins favored early adopters by a huge margin.
It's already too late to get in. The difficulty level has reached the point where buying and powering the new hardware is not cost-effective. And that was before the price of Bitcoins crashed. (The current price is around $13.)
Then there's the flaky exchange problem. Mt. Gox (formerly Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange) turns out to be two people in Tokyo. Tradehill is some company in Chile. All the other exchanges are too dinky to matter. Not one of them has the organization and resources of a typical small-town bank. Worse, they're not just "exchanges". They're depositary institutions, holding customer balances. Mt. Gox customers are now very aware of this, because they can't get at their money while Mt. Gox is down. Some people are worried over whether the money will be there when Mt. Gox comes back up.
The "exchanges" represent a mis-design of Bitcoin. There should have been a way to do an exchange in a distributed way, without the exchange holding customer assets. The NYSE and NASDAQ don't hold customer balances. Brokers do, but you can have your cash swept from a brokerage into a bank daily, or more often if the numbers get big. The Bitcoin exchanges are slow at delivering money - Mt. Gox has a daily transfer limit, and even when they were up, many users reported delays.
The EFF was right to bail.
Ah, the C++ committee. They've added lots of l33t features, and haven't fixed any of the safety problems. You can still get raw pointers. You still sometimes need them. The language-level arrays are still unsized, like C, and there will still be buffer overflows. (Yes, if you do everything the "C++ way", buffer overflows are much less likely. Now try to use the Linux API. There are too many places where the programmer has to be "very careful". People who think that's OK should be put on maintenance programming for a year.)
C++ remains the only major language with hiding ("abstraction") but without pointer safety.
With TradeHill back up and running for a few hours, there's now a functioning Bitcoin market. For a few hours, there was a huge spread between bid and ask prices, and thus few trades. Now the spread has tightened up, and price seems to have settled down around $11.90/BTC. The market remains thin; selling a few hundred bitcoins would crash the market.
It's a dinky market by any standard. The total volume at TradeHill, under $20,000 today, is comparable to a big gas station or a supermarket.
I can't see how they spent $200 million on that turkey. There aren't that many sets, and the big ones are obviously green-screen work. The alien city (?) is so fuzzy that it looks like bad video game art.
The hero is a jerk. The villain is pointless. The Green Lantern corps meeting looks like a Nazi rally, fist-raising and all.
Wait for the DVD, coming to a bargain bin near you soon. Maybe this will kill off the second-tier comic superhero genre for a while.
Since after the EMP bombs all go off, no one's eReaders are gonna be working all that well anymore.
Back in the 1950s, there was an Civil Defense effort to collect the information necessary to start up an industrial society. The info was copies to microfilm and placed in major fallout shelters, along with some simple microfilm viewers.
I'd really like to find a copy of those microfilms.
other USD exchanges are still running fine.
From Bitcoin.org's market table:
Look at those tiny volumes. Total volume for all the little guys is under 0.1% of Mt. Gox, which was trading over 200,000 bitcoins per day. With Mt. Gox and TradeHill off-line, the market is dead. None of those little guys have any significant buyers available.
Sorry, but are you dense?
K.K. Tibanne
24-30, Kugayama 5-Chome
Suginami-ku, Tokyo 168-0082
That's the company that does their hosting and web design, not Mt. Gox's financial services.
The money transferred out of the exchange is gone and MtGox IS going to eat the losses, and do a proper rollback.
The question is 1) do they have the cash to do that, and 2) do they have their own cash to do that, as opposed to taking it from the accounts of their customers (see Madoff, Bernie). This is why depository institutions need outside audits.
There's a lot we don't know about Mt. Gox. Do they trade Bitcoins themselves? The value of Bitcoins is way down from the peak; does Mt. Gox have a problem with losses? After a screwup like this, it's necessary to ask those questions.
As for "personal integrity", the operator of Mt. Gox is anonymous. What personal integrity?
"Mt. Gox", the main Bitcoin exchange, was originally "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange". Nobody really knows who runs "Mt. Gox"; it appears to be one person in Tokyo who's only reachable via email and IRC. (He must be having a terrible night; this all happened around 3AM in Japan.) It's not like there's some real financial institution, or even a funded start-up, behind this. Most, if not all, of the Bitcoin "exchanges" and "exchangers" are somewhat flaky entities. Bitcoin's ecosystem is financially very weak.
Understand that Mt. Gox is not just an exchange. It's a depository institution, like a bank. Customers have balances, in Bitcoins and other currencies, with Mt. Gox. But Mt. Gox is not regulated or audited as a bank or a brokerage, even though it holds other people's money. Accounts are uninsured.
This matters when something goes wrong and somebody gets stuck with losses. Mt. Gox claims they're going to "roll back" transactions to before the theft. But some of the money is already gone, transferred out before Mt. Gox shut down. Mt. Gox is going to have to eat some of those losses if they do a rollback. Do they have the cash? Nobody knows. They're not audited by anybody.
As for the security breach, not only is the entire file of usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords now widely available, so are the unencrypted passwords cracked so far. (One wonders why whomever stole the password file published it, but it may have to do with their needing help from others to crack the passwords.) As a result, TradeHill, another Bitcoin exchange based in Chile, has shut down, to avoid attacks using passwords obtained from Mt. Gox. Right now, there's no way to turn Bitcoins into dollars. (Euros, yes; right now the going rate is EUR11.51/BTC. But that market is very thin.)
Whether or not BItcoins are a good idea, the market ecosystem behind them is far too flaky.
This process is called neutron activation analysis. It's well known. The practical problems are 1) not putting in so many neutrons that the tested object becomes radioactive, and 2) detecting enough emitted particles in a reasonable length of time. There's an obvious tradeoff there. The second problem is solvable with a large number of detectors, which probably means a portal or tunnel setup, rather than a hand-held device.
Here's a commercial luggage screening machine from Russia which includes nuclear material detection by neutron activation, along with regular explosive detection.
The reason we don't have compatibility is that the sellers have more power than the buyers. When sellers are many and weak, as in desktop PCs, compatibility is good.
In aerospace, compatibility is made to work. There's a specification, and both sides of an interface must conform to the specification. That's why you can unbolt a Pratt and Whitney engine from a 747, bolt on a Rolls Royce engine, and go fly. In telephony, you can buy many basic components from a number of suppliers. Phone compatibility with cellular networks is technically a tougher problem than JavaScript compatibility, yet carriers make the phone manufacturers and cell site manufacturers interoperate properly.
It's about power, not technology.
The Chevy Volt inherently has a complex use cycle. It can be plugged in for slow charge, fast charged, or fueled. Heating and air conditioning use matters a lot. So do hills. Info about the use cycle is needed to figure out the tradeoffs. Would adding 50% more battery capacity be a win or a lose? What about if battery prices dropped 20%?
The Volt's software notices if the gasoline engine isn't needed for 6 weeks or so, and prompts the driver to run the engine briefly, so it gets warmed up and rotated. If there's almost no fuel use in a year, it prompts you to run the engine and add some fresh gasoline (there's a shelf life problem). How many drivers hit those limits? Nobody knows yet.
Some technologies die because they require a substantial infrastructure to sustain them. Kodachrome is a recent example. The special dyes, the factory that made then, and the elaborate, specialized processing labs are all gone now.
Steam locomotives are getting there. They require a major overhaul every 100,000 miles or so, and the massive infrastructure needed for that is long gone. There are people restoring the things as hobbyist projects, but they're taking a decade to do a job that a proper shop once did in a week. (Yes, I know about Tornado. It took them 19 years to build one locomotive, and when it had a boiler problem, they had to ship the thing to Germany for repairs.)
There's a lot of dead technology in the amplifier area. Before electronic amplifiers, there were decades of kludges, built to desperately try to make a big signal from a little one. The Teleharmonium in the original article was an example. They couldn't amplify audio, so they had to generate enough power at the head end to drive every speaker in the system. Each note had its own sizable AC generator, which is how they got to 200 tons of gear. Edison's "chalk telephone", the electromotograph, was an early amplifier Bell Telephone used electromagnetic speaker coils driving resistive carbon button transmitters as amplifiers. There are a number of mechanical amplifier types based on friction clutches. There were amplifiers based on electrical rotating machinery, like amplidynes and Ward-Leonard drives. All of these sucked so bad that they were discarded once tubes and power semiconductors became available.
(OK, Ward-Leonard drives live on. If you get into an elevator, and it's not moving but you hear a sizable motor running, that's a Ward-Leonard speed control, 1890 technology. It's an AC motor driving a DC generator, with the field current on the DC generator being adjusted to control speed. This has the advantage that the flywheel on the drive provides some of the energy for starting the elevator, and peak current is reduced.)
Amazon needs to run submitted eBooks through TurnItIn to check for plagiarism. Otherwise, they're involved in copyright infringement for profit, which is a felony in the US.
*Corn* ethanol was always a boondoggle, brought to you by lobbyists and innumerate politicians who were unable to understand or care about the concept of EREOI.
Right. The ethanol subsidy applied to the output of ethanol plants that used other fuels to run the distillation process. So unsubsidized natural gas went in and subsidized ethanol came out. In some cases this was a net energy loss. If ethanol plants were required to be self-powering (as most oil refineries are), and there was no subsidy for energy consumed in the process, it wouldn't be so bad.
"Sports fans" are pathetic. People who actually participate in sports are fine. I've spent lots of time in gyms and on horseback, and the jerk level is relatively low. The bar and club crowd, even when drunk, is seldom more than annoying.
But crowds of drunk oinkers leaving a stadium act like they're entitled to make trouble. Then they try to drive. I'm for running everybody leaving the stadium through a blood alcohol test and dumping the drunks into holding pens until they're fit to rejoin society.
Also, don't forget that IBM is one of the only companies big enough to put serious money into research anymore. In my mind, that's really important. Where are all the CS, physics and EE Ph. D's going to work now that Bell Labs is gone and HP only does product research?
IBM Research is a shadow of what it once was. I happened to be up at IBM's Almaden Research Center the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was not a happy day.
The actual article is more along the lines of "We're going to port all our crappy but popular apps like Farmville from Flash to JavaScript to get onto the iPhone."
Of course you follow the money. There aren't that many spammers; about three years ago, there seemed to be only about ten unique large-scale spammers. Taking one of them down made a significant dent in spam traffic for a month.
Junky spam and junky bogus web sites are obsolete, even in the criminal world. The old mindset was to filter out emails and sites that "looked junky". The old "Web Spam Challenge was based on this. They have a big file of pages which humans have classified, by a quick look, as "spam" or "not spam". Five or ten years ago, that sort of worked, because most of the junk sites were really tacky. Phishing sites used to have blatant misspellings. That's history. Today's crooks have good web site production values.
So you have to dig deeper. On the web spam/bogus web site front, part of the right answer is to find out who's behind the web site and do a background check. (We do that at SiteTruth.com, as I've mentioned before.) Right now, even a superficial check (is there a mailing address on the site? Is it a known phishing site? Do seals of approval check out? Non-junk SSL cert?) is enough to knock out a big fraction of the junk. The deeper checks (is there a business at that address? How long in business? How much revenue last year? What's their business credit rating?) tell us enough to have some confidence about business legitimacy.
The original article mentions "ordering tons of stuff from phishing scams to trace the path of the money." That's what the FBI should be doing more of. Law enforcement can have accounts created, plug into the credit card system, and watch their credit cards being used in real time. It's hard to do that without law enforcement authority.
There's more than high speed rail going on. China is building an inter-provincial expressway system, too. The interior provinces aren't sharing in the prosperity of the coastal ones. Better roads and better freight rail will help. Historically, China discouraged inter-provincial trade, and each province was expected to be self-sufficient. That's still to some extent true, and there's some internal friction over eliminating internal trade restrictions. They won't survive a really good highway system.
The history of the US Interstate Highway System isn't quite applicable, though. Every state has at least one interstate highway, and most have at least two. That's a consequence of how Congress is set up. China's transportation system is thin in the western portion of the country.
This is what happens without unions.
At least it's not Apple behind this. They'd be announcing an iEclipse(tm) of the iMoon (tm). And it would be pay per view.
Russia has their own problems. When communism went down, they had a power vacuum, which was filled by organized crime. For a while, Russia had rule by "oligarchs". Putin managed to get the biggest oligarchs under control, the ones big enough to challenge national power. But there are still too many crooks per capita left, and they tend to be too closely tied to parts of the Government.
This is why we have so much trouble with various computer attacks out of Russia. Some are private, some may be actual military intrusions, and some may be private parties trying to get info they can sell to the military.
Bear in mind that Russia (and many third world countries) have little private fiefdoms within their military. Generals running profit-making businesses on the side isn't at all unusual in much of the world, especially when the military is better organized than the rest of the country. (This is a disease of countries with too big a military and not enough for them to do. The US military is so busy nobody has time for that nonsense. Homeland Security, though...)
but was turned off by the amateurish and non-reputable state of current exchanges. There are no guarantees, no safeguards, no oversight, no insurance, and no straightforward way for me to establish the credibility of any of these exchanges.
Exactly. Some of those "exchanges" are unregulated depository institutions. That's where the term "Ponzi scheme" applies. You really wonder if they actually have the assets. Especially when there are so many obstacles to getting money out.