And you know this how? You're either making shit up to appear smart, or a genuine idiot bragging about her actual extensive experience working for a drug cartel on a public web forum where your IP can be easily traced - on a story discussing a drug bust that ultimately resulted from the accused posting on a forum, no less.
Or option c: I have had friends who got involved in the wrong people, and helped to get them out of it, with the help of law enforcement and a lot of time at a law library where, reviewing case after case of drug busts of all varieties searching for a technicality, I may have inadvertently learned a few things as well the good old fashioned way: With primary research.
Either way, epic fail.
I could not have stated your failure any more succinctly.
ou do realize that intentionally ignoring good entertainment doesn't make you some kind of hero, right?
You do realize that 'good entertainment' is an entirely subjective thing, whereas my explanation about why providing fictional examples to buttress a position about an actual, realworld event, was not.
You just come off as an idiot putting up a resistance just to
Just to what? Try and be funny and informative at the same time? Just to listen to hipsters amongst us like yourself that find the empty chattering of TV with 30% commercials dumped into your brain "entertainment" and can't understand why everybody doesn't join them so they have to mock them?
The big mistake hipsters make is assuming anyone cares about how hipster they are. We were talking about encryption, virtual currencies, legal tactics, and as usual where people gather, the occasional pop culture reference.
A hipster would have said they were watching it before it was cool, not snarking about how they didn't watch it at all, and then proceeding to explain why. However, despite getting all the details wrong, you managed a remarkably good rant.
Microsoft interfeces? Sounds like shitty interfaces to me!
They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn. When Apple did it, everyone pissed themselves like excited dogs, and then when Microsoft tried again... everyone said they stole the idea from Apple. Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives. For some reason though, they rarely manage to get on the train. Execution and follow-through has always been a problem for the organization; Especially now that the CEO is a dancing monkey-man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Kind of sad, really. Apple continues to gain marketshare and is making more money with it's 1 out of 8 people using Apple products than Microsoft is with 7 out of 8 using their OS. How incompetent do you have to be to lose when you've got 8 times the marketshare?:\
Actually, a better "analogy" is that they work hard on making sure that cash can't be used anonymously. Each transaction must be monitored
You know what the classic solution to all this is, right? Allow me a quote from a movie made a long time ago, called Enemy of the State;
Brill: In guerrilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths. Robert Clayton Dean: Such as? Brill: Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.
Guys... all their equipment is wired into the internet. A lot of it is the internet. And we're in a world where everything is increasingly interconnected and online all the time, everywhere. There's nothing they can do that we can't do too. They wanna watch us? We'll watch them. They wanna revoke passports overseas... I hope they don't plan on buying any plane tickets using credit cards. Frustrate them. Fuck with them.
Oh they'll call you a terrorist, they'll probably even throw in the word 'cyber' a lot, because they love cybering. But if you're good, and you're smart about it... they're gonna be hard-pressed to find you because you are one person in a target-rich environment. You can afford to pick and choose who, where, and when your engagements are. They can't. They're a fat blob of wires, ego, and data centers.
The NSA becoming this bloated piece of shit that tries to monitor everything is a major strategic weakness. They've moved off their primary focus. They've spread themselves too thin, trying to do too much at once, and this "NSA 2.0" they're rolling out has caused a previously impregnable organization to start leaking like a sieve. They're weak guys.
Let me be clear on this, because everyone's running around thinking the NSA is this unstoppable cyber super organization. They're fat, slow, and weak. They're exposed. It is just a matter of time before someone takes them to school on this. I'm not suggesting you do this. Or you. Or anyone. But the NSA has pissed off a lot of people, and we have enemies both foreign and domestic that want a little payback.
Well, meat's back on the menu guys. Anyone with an iota of tactical understanding realizes that when you try to be everything, everywhere, all the time... when you fight a protracted war... you exhaust your resources, your troops get tired, and then... then you lose.
The NSA is about to take a special kind of fall guys. Even if nobody gives them a helping push, they're going to collapse under their own weight. The intelligence cycle depends on timely analysis, accurate information, and good communication between analysts, management, and clients. Whenever you bloat up, communication increases exponentially, while the 'signal', the amount of useful information coming out, drops. We've all seen e-mail shitstorms in the office... there are intelligence community equivalents guys. The NSA is super-saturating itself and will render itself inert within a decade at the rate it is going... without any outside help whatsoever.
This isn't James Bond knowledge I'm working off of. There are people working at the NSA. And while I can't say what any one of them is doing, I know as a group that right now... it's a pressure-cooker environment. And if I had any way of validating that out there, I'd bet real money right now on it.
...really smart people creating things - "war machines" to be blunt - [...]... My 2 Cents. Feel free to disagree...
"Fun fact; before he built rockets for the Nazis, the idealistic Werner von Braun dreamed of space travel, he star gazed. Do you know what he said when the first V2 hit London? 'The rocket performed perfectly, it just landed on the wrong planet.' See we all begin wide-eyed, pure science. And then the ego steps in, the obsession. And you look up, you're a long way from shore." -- Maya Hansen, Iron Man 3
Nothing can beat the NSA in the surveillance event competition!
They're merely afraid that someone will put up pictures of Putin in a tutu, or barebacking it with a horse, or any of the hundreds of other highly suggestive photos of the man who has decided gays are full of evil. There have been lots of protests and arrests in Russia over this lately, and demands both domestically and abroad that the Olympics be boycotted over this gross human rights violation.
Nonetheless, the international community seems to be taking the view that entertainment exceeds human rights, and largely considers this an "internal" affair in Russia. All that said... guess what the response has been? "We're not going to have a problem here. We're going to surveil the shit out of everyone and everything. No protester will make it past the perimeter. Putin's horse-loving pictures will not make it into THIS facility!"
Your comment gives me a crappy black feeling deep inside my chest.
As it should. We can't claim to be living to the highest ideals of democracy as long as wealth inequity exists on the scale that it does. So long as men toil and tolerate meaningless labor, potential is being wasted. We have given a tiny fraction of the population wide freedom of choice and an affluent lifestyle, at the expense of putting the overwhelming majority into poverty. This is not sustainable, nor is it moral. But it is, nevertheless, the current state of affairs.
America has never lived up to its promise as the "land of opportunity" save for a brief period after WWII called the 'golden era'. Prior to that, there was the depression, and before that the industrial revolution... where workers would fall into the machines and lose their limbs or worse, and that was pretty much it for them. There was no health care, no government assistance. Them, and their families, were suddenly dependent entirely on the charity of others, and many perished. And today, despite our technological advances, the inequities of our society continue marching forward.
Many, if not most, of our accomplishments in the area of civil rights were due not to a sudden enlightenment of our population and embracing of democratic ideals, but the more pragmatic issue of economics.
The end to slavery; We needed more workers, and frankly, slaves just don't work that hard. They're slaves. You get more work out of people by taking off the real chains and giving them a wage. By replacing the physical and concrete with an abstract, productivity improves. They are still slaves -- they have limited options for employment and only long hours for only crumbs... but the illusion of freedom makes them work harder.
Women's lib: Women moved into the workplace because during WWII, all the men were shoved into a meat grinder and many didn't come back. Someone had to work the factories. Oh we talk about how it was a great stride forward for women's liberty and feminism... but it wasn't. Economics dictated it happen... it's just that other people took credit for it.
In fact, with only a very few exceptions, economics created the circumstances in which these movements happened, and while we pat ourselves on the back and elevate our heroes... their names and actions would not have been possible, or remembered, without the backing of money. There's a reason economics is listed under the social sciences, not the physical; Because it really is all about people. You want to understand a society -- follow the money.
The fact is, America has never been a strong cultural center for the world. We are an economic power, not a cultural one. Our diplomats are predator drones and stealth bombers... not because we're excessively militant but because military power is cheap when you have a large class of poor people. We can mobilize millions to go fight proxy wars on behalf of our economic interests -- people talk about the high cost of the wars we've had, but compared to how much money we rake in from international trade, it's chump change.
Until that changes; Until America has culture, not just money and rationalizations derived from it, you won't see very many idealists getting very far in this society. We have the same potentiality in our people as the people of any other country; But we're squandering it because right now, America's business... is business.
So, what you're saying is that Walter White did it right in Breaking Bad when he hired Saul with a rather large retainer.
I'd have to actually turn on a TV to be able to answer that. I'm dimly aware there's some bald guy with a beard on some TV show called 'Breaking Bad' that everyone goes on about on Facebook, and that it has something to do with drugs. But beyond that, I couldn't tell you anything about the show. The only things on TV I watch are Mythbusters, Shark Week when it rolls around, How Things Work, Engineering Marvels, and similar. I used to watch the History channel, back when it actually had stuff about history on it. Now it seems to be as much about History as the Food channel is about food. I think I could probably watch it for the better part of a day before figuring out how to boil water. -_-
Snark aside though... if this 'Walter White' guy is mass producing drugs for a TV show, the odds are very, very good that the producers have given a highly slanted perspective on how drugs are actually made and distributed, because the day to day is actually quite boring for the people involved... and they don't make as much money as you seem to think either. The drug cartels are, just like regular supra-corporate entities, screwing over their workers and wealth and power tends to be concentrated at the top. It is unlikely a single man producing his own drugs, regardless of the type of drug, could manage production, packaging, distribution, etc., and not attract the attention of these entities. And they don't react like normal businesses do to a newcomer to the market; They tend to show up and either kill you where you stand, or offer you a deal where you basically work for them for next to nothing... or they kill you where you stand.
And all of this ignores law enforcement activity and the peripheral risks, which I'm sure are glorified and hollywooded up in the above-referenced series... but in actuality, there aren't catchy one liners, and dark meetings in alleyways or restaurants with tattooed latino guys with guns, or white guys in suits like in Batman. Conversation and plot is severely lacking in real life... it all revolves around people dying, people not wanting to die, and both sides doing whatever seems best to achieve those respective aims. The conversation, when it happens, tends to be short, to the point, and not particularly noteworthy or quotable. Something to the effect of "You mother fuck--(bang)gggrhhnnggggrrrhhhhh... *gurgle* wrrrrrrr... *wheeze* *gurgle* whyyyyyy? *gurgle* *splat*" Like I said, not particularly quotable.
'd also point out that netbooks do NOT use tons of power and
... It's not the netbook per-se that sucks your wallet dry. It's the power brick. As long as it's connected, it's vampirically sucking juice, and depending on its efficiency rating and power correction factor. PCF is the reason why running your fridge is so expensive -- it doesn't consume as much electricity as your bill says it does, but whenever you put something across the rails that is an inductor (transformer, motor, etc.) the voltage and current come out of phase -- you are charged based on how much current you're using at any point in time, as the meter measures amperage across it, not voltage drop. So running electrical motors can cost you a lot. That's why at most industrial factories you will find a large electrical motor next to the mains that just sits there all day, spinning. It won't be connected to anything, except maybe an exhaust fan; It is a syncronization motor, and its sole purpose is to match phase with the mains and correct for any phase shifting caused by equipment in the plant. For something like an aluminum smelting plant, if this engine, which performs literally no actual work, breaks down it is a bigger plant emergency than any other single piece of equipment breaking because of this simple glitch in how meters work.
Your netbook may sip electricity... but the power brick it's connected to is probably nothing more than a transformer with a fat ass capacitor and a half-bridge rectifier in it. And that's what's gonna bleed you.
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
No, he has the bitcoin equivalent of 600,000; Not 600,000 actual coins. The coins themselves are divisible.. so he has a crapton of fractions of coins, adding up to a total of 600,000.
Now what consequence would this be for the bitcoin as a currency, when a significant chunk of its coins are taken our of the equation? It's about 5% of the current total number of almost 12 million bitcoin in existence (and 3% of the theoretical maximum of 21 mln)
">100,000,000. So in actuality, there are 2,099,999,997,690,000 units of currency that can be traded without modification to the current protocol. What most people don't understand about bitcoin is that even if a few coins here and there fall out of circulation, or even more than a few, so long as there are a sufficient number of atomic currency units available for trade, the system will function perfectly. Trading in bitcoins is more like trading in company stock than in actual currency -- they can be divided, aggregated, etc., etc. A bitcoin is, at the protocol level, just a token for a massive transactional log called the 'block chain'. It doesn't matter how many bitcoins are generated, or how many fall out of circulation, as long as enough remain in circulation to cover the transactions since the last block in the chain was created.
Another thing of note, is that apparently a single bitcoin user managed to amass 5% of the total number of that currency in existence. Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash. Smaller quantities have that potential already.
That person is now no longer a person, but a government. Just a minor footnote. Now, all that said, here's the thing about bitcoins... should we ever run out of them for whatever reason, we can always 'reset the clock' as it were -- start a new seed, a new block zero, and start building a new block chain from there. This isn't like IPv4 address space exhaustion; We just plug in a new seed and viola, Bitcoin Mark II.
Eeeh... all that said, I don't trade in bitcoins and I think the entire business is silly but if we're going to talk turkey, we should at least be accurate in our assessments.
There's not much chance of *all* of it disappearing it that way and the currency is infinitely divisible if required. There will always be enough.
Yeah... because we've never had problems with adding a crapton of floating point and extra decimal places to math with computers before. (rolls eyes) Please. Some of the greatest financial scams of our time were based on rounding and floating point errors. The idea that the currency can be "infinitely divisible" is not a selling point, it's a structural weakness.
But that is part of the game. You gut someones means and prosecute them so they can't defend themselves. That is the game the government plays.
Only with people dumb enough to not prepare ahead of time for this. This guy was 'new money'. He didn't know how to manage his assets, how to invest, how to setup multiple accounts, and didn't have the good sense to bond a lawyer ahead of time and give them limited power of attorney so they could coordinate his estate while he was in jail. See, this is what 'old money' does, and it means they get to hire entire bus loads of attorneys to show up at court, and the government can't do dick about it because they were bought and paid for ahead of time and are being funded out of accounts they can't seize or have access to because the money's been cleaned and separated from his personal accounts through shell corporations, etc.
Don't talk about how to play the game... this guy wasn't a player, he was a loser. He was setup from day one, by his own stupidity, to lose. If I was running a website like that, the very first thing I'd have done after getting ahead financially is separate out as much money as I could for future legal troubles, and hire accountants and lawyers so when the day came to save my sorry ass, all I'd have to do is just sit in jail and wait while Plan Bravo executed all on its own to spring me.
But, since the man was basically a walking cliche instead of a proper criminal or businessman or even passably decent nerd, I feel compelled to quote off his namesake:
"Do you hear that, Fezzik? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. The Man in Black makes it now."
in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins.
Yes, and given how badly he managed his assets, I doubt even a fraction of this will be recovered. He was not a very good businessman, his servers weren't very well secured... in fact the only thing in the "had lots of" category with this guy was ego. I mean really... "Dread Pirate Roberts"? And have you seen some of the things he wrote on this website of his? "I'll take as much of your money as I want because this is my ship. If you don't like it, fuck off." -- It's actually included in the criminal indictment against him, along with a laundry list of, shall we say, personality shortcomings of his leading to other elements of the criminal underground coming by to explain all meanings of the word "respect" to him, and then him blowing tons and tons of money either paying these people off, or trying (pathetically) to put hits out on them.
If there's one charge I could add to the indictment, it would be criminal stupidity.
It now comes out that those 26,000 Bitcoins aren't even Ulbricht's. Instead, they're actually from Silk Road's users. In other words, these were Bitcoins stored with user accounts on Silk Road.
Technically, they were for purchases pending. Silk road worked by letting you transfer coins into a silk road proxy account. It ran every submission through its "tumbler" to randomize which coins were actually used for which transactions. So what was seized was basically the day's take out of the register, as it were.
Ulbricht's actual wallet is separate from that, and was apparently encrypted, so it would appear that...
That he'll be charged as a terrorist and sequested in a room somewhere to be beaten with a metal pipe or waterboarded until he gives up the password. Has anyone heard from him lately?
And given that some courts have argued you can't be forced to give up your encryption, as it's a 5th Amendment violation...
We'll just create a new court especially to prosecute terrorists like him extrajudicially. Oh wait... we already did.
The article also notes that the FBI's own Bitcoin wallet has been identified, leading to some snarky micropayment messages headed their direction.
Taunting the police has historically worked out quite well for criminals. Dude, you aren't anonymous. You basically just signed your own search warrant.
For the same reason he doesn't; You learn early in life if you stand up for what you believe in, authority will make an example out of you. So you learn to fly under the radar, and cherish those precious few moments in life when you can do good without being punished.
It's youthful idealism to think people will risk their freedom, their home, their financial security, their family, to combat an injustice. Especially against a vastly better equipped adversary like a large corporation with an excessively-sized legal department and millions or billions of dollars to burn... and full access to a legal system that can take away everything you own and away from everyone you know, at the snap of a gavel.
The few people who can't give up their idealism to become "successful" (that is, capitulate to the demands of the dominant social institutions of their era) very rarely manage to achieve social change -- the Ghandis and Martin Luther Kings to the Che Guevaras, etc., in a socially acceptable fashion. The majority simply become homeless, outcast from the system, develop mental or physical illness, and die early, and generally alone. And then there's the extreme fringe that, so frustrated by an inability to accomplish anything, take themselves out of the picture in a hailstorm of bullets or fire. Terrorism can promote social change, though it's politically unpopular to say this.
But as you can see... idealism is not particularly practical, which is why few people practice it except in small doses.
MasterCard is joining the FIDO Alliance, signaling that the payment network is getting interested in using fingerprints and other biometric data to identify people for
the purposes of targetted advertising and because the government asked them to provide more ways of tracking people with rfid, massive databases of biometric data, cell phones, etc. We can always say it's for "fraud protection", in the same way that those automated messages say "this call is being recorded for your protection." O RLY? Pretty sure you meant to say our. -_-
Please. By adding new standards like this they're helping to lock out competition from places like Paypal or the extensive wire fund transfer systems in place in Europe. "Ah! Well, now you need biometrics to make transactions in this country, or with these vendors. It's Everywhere You Want To Be (the Visa slogan) is starting to sound less like a convenience and more like a crazy ex stalking you.
Yeah... about that... while I can't find the text of that leaked XBox memo because Microsoft has been busy suing and scrubbing it off google search results, it's pretty clear that their definition of not lying is basically telling half-truths, white lies, and spin control. Like, for example, "Xbox One Kinect Is Not Built For Advertising"... well in the strict MicrosoftieSpeak(tm) sense, that's correct; it was built for entertainment. The fact that it's loaded down with a fuckton of advertising is just, you know, an extra 'feature'.
It would help to add credibility to your argument by not getting some basic facts incorrect. For starters, Schwartz was not a student at MIT. For another, the overseeing prosecutor and main face of the legal action against him was a woman, Carmen Ortiz. If you want to be taken seriously next time, some basic research on your part is in order.
Oh, I'm sorry... I only remember important details like how some kid corpsified, because of an overzealous prosecutor, and the morality of doing so. If I tripped up on the insignificant part like where he was from, and whether the prosecutor's genitals were on the inside, or the outside... oh. fucking. well.
If you want to be taken seriously next time, focusing on the actual meat of the argument rather than the irrelvant details is in order.
I'm talking about the RT-N66U, with the latest stable version of DD-WRT; v24-SP2, July 2013 release. Through trial and error, I've found the max before the load average causes it to start choking and delaying packets is about 1300 connections, with a TCP timeout of 900 and a UDP timeout of 60. Note that these numbers are far below what the 'out of the box' defaults are. Those defaults may work if you are not using QoS, but if latency and buffer bloat is a concern of yours, then you're going to find it chokes at a much lower threshold than the documentation and online reports suggest.
It's hardly a surprise to me that a CPU running at 300mhz might have problems shaping more than a few mbits/s of traffic.. hell even with the overclocking tweaked to nearly double speed and the damn thing hot enough you could cook an egg on it, it still can't handle the load for very long. This is entirely CPU bottleneck, there's plenty of memory and plenty of I/O available.
Slashdot Mirror
And you know this how? You're either making shit up to appear smart, or a genuine idiot bragging about her actual extensive experience working for a drug cartel on a public web forum where your IP can be easily traced - on a story discussing a drug bust that ultimately resulted from the accused posting on a forum, no less.
Or option c: I have had friends who got involved in the wrong people, and helped to get them out of it, with the help of law enforcement and a lot of time at a law library where, reviewing case after case of drug busts of all varieties searching for a technicality, I may have inadvertently learned a few things as well the good old fashioned way: With primary research.
Either way, epic fail.
I could not have stated your failure any more succinctly.
ou do realize that intentionally ignoring good entertainment doesn't make you some kind of hero, right?
You do realize that 'good entertainment' is an entirely subjective thing, whereas my explanation about why providing fictional examples to buttress a position about an actual, realworld event, was not.
You just come off as an idiot putting up a resistance just to
Just to what? Try and be funny and informative at the same time? Just to listen to hipsters amongst us like yourself that find the empty chattering of TV with 30% commercials dumped into your brain "entertainment" and can't understand why everybody doesn't join them so they have to mock them?
The big mistake hipsters make is assuming anyone cares about how hipster they are. We were talking about encryption, virtual currencies, legal tactics, and as usual where people gather, the occasional pop culture reference.
A hipster would have said they were watching it before it was cool, not snarking about how they didn't watch it at all, and then proceeding to explain why. However, despite getting all the details wrong, you managed a remarkably good rant.
Microsoft interfeces? Sounds like shitty interfaces to me!
They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn. When Apple did it, everyone pissed themselves like excited dogs, and then when Microsoft tried again... everyone said they stole the idea from Apple. Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives. For some reason though, they rarely manage to get on the train. Execution and follow-through has always been a problem for the organization; Especially now that the CEO is a dancing monkey-man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Kind of sad, really. Apple continues to gain marketshare and is making more money with it's 1 out of 8 people using Apple products than Microsoft is with 7 out of 8 using their OS. How incompetent do you have to be to lose when you've got 8 times the marketshare? :\
Actually, a better "analogy" is that they work hard on making sure that cash can't be used anonymously. Each transaction must be monitored
You know what the classic solution to all this is, right? Allow me a quote from a movie made a long time ago, called Enemy of the State;
Brill: In guerrilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths.
Robert Clayton Dean: Such as?
Brill: Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.
Guys... all their equipment is wired into the internet. A lot of it is the internet. And we're in a world where everything is increasingly interconnected and online all the time, everywhere. There's nothing they can do that we can't do too. They wanna watch us? We'll watch them. They wanna revoke passports overseas... I hope they don't plan on buying any plane tickets using credit cards. Frustrate them. Fuck with them.
Oh they'll call you a terrorist, they'll probably even throw in the word 'cyber' a lot, because they love cybering. But if you're good, and you're smart about it... they're gonna be hard-pressed to find you because you are one person in a target-rich environment. You can afford to pick and choose who, where, and when your engagements are. They can't. They're a fat blob of wires, ego, and data centers.
The NSA becoming this bloated piece of shit that tries to monitor everything is a major strategic weakness. They've moved off their primary focus. They've spread themselves too thin, trying to do too much at once, and this "NSA 2.0" they're rolling out has caused a previously impregnable organization to start leaking like a sieve. They're weak guys.
Let me be clear on this, because everyone's running around thinking the NSA is this unstoppable cyber super organization. They're fat, slow, and weak. They're exposed. It is just a matter of time before someone takes them to school on this. I'm not suggesting you do this. Or you. Or anyone. But the NSA has pissed off a lot of people, and we have enemies both foreign and domestic that want a little payback.
Well, meat's back on the menu guys. Anyone with an iota of tactical understanding realizes that when you try to be everything, everywhere, all the time... when you fight a protracted war... you exhaust your resources, your troops get tired, and then... then you lose.
The NSA is about to take a special kind of fall guys. Even if nobody gives them a helping push, they're going to collapse under their own weight. The intelligence cycle depends on timely analysis, accurate information, and good communication between analysts, management, and clients. Whenever you bloat up, communication increases exponentially, while the 'signal', the amount of useful information coming out, drops. We've all seen e-mail shitstorms in the office... there are intelligence community equivalents guys. The NSA is super-saturating itself and will render itself inert within a decade at the rate it is going... without any outside help whatsoever.
This isn't James Bond knowledge I'm working off of. There are people working at the NSA. And while I can't say what any one of them is doing, I know as a group that right now... it's a pressure-cooker environment. And if I had any way of validating that out there, I'd bet real money right now on it.
...really smart people creating things - "war machines" to be blunt - [...]... My 2 Cents. Feel free to disagree...
"Fun fact; before he built rockets for the Nazis, the idealistic Werner von Braun dreamed of space travel, he star gazed. Do you know what he said when the first V2 hit London? 'The rocket performed perfectly, it just landed on the wrong planet.' See we all begin wide-eyed, pure science. And then the ego steps in, the obsession. And you look up, you're a long way from shore."
-- Maya Hansen, Iron Man 3
Nothing can beat the NSA in the surveillance event competition!
They're merely afraid that someone will put up pictures of Putin in a tutu, or barebacking it with a horse, or any of the hundreds of other highly suggestive photos of the man who has decided gays are full of evil. There have been lots of protests and arrests in Russia over this lately, and demands both domestically and abroad that the Olympics be boycotted over this gross human rights violation.
Nonetheless, the international community seems to be taking the view that entertainment exceeds human rights, and largely considers this an "internal" affair in Russia. All that said... guess what the response has been? "We're not going to have a problem here. We're going to surveil the shit out of everyone and everything. No protester will make it past the perimeter. Putin's horse-loving pictures will not make it into THIS facility!"
Your comment gives me a crappy black feeling deep inside my chest.
As it should. We can't claim to be living to the highest ideals of democracy as long as wealth inequity exists on the scale that it does. So long as men toil and tolerate meaningless labor, potential is being wasted. We have given a tiny fraction of the population wide freedom of choice and an affluent lifestyle, at the expense of putting the overwhelming majority into poverty. This is not sustainable, nor is it moral. But it is, nevertheless, the current state of affairs.
America has never lived up to its promise as the "land of opportunity" save for a brief period after WWII called the 'golden era'. Prior to that, there was the depression, and before that the industrial revolution... where workers would fall into the machines and lose their limbs or worse, and that was pretty much it for them. There was no health care, no government assistance. Them, and their families, were suddenly dependent entirely on the charity of others, and many perished. And today, despite our technological advances, the inequities of our society continue marching forward.
Many, if not most, of our accomplishments in the area of civil rights were due not to a sudden enlightenment of our population and embracing of democratic ideals, but the more pragmatic issue of economics.
The end to slavery; We needed more workers, and frankly, slaves just don't work that hard. They're slaves. You get more work out of people by taking off the real chains and giving them a wage. By replacing the physical and concrete with an abstract, productivity improves. They are still slaves -- they have limited options for employment and only long hours for only crumbs... but the illusion of freedom makes them work harder.
Women's lib: Women moved into the workplace because during WWII, all the men were shoved into a meat grinder and many didn't come back. Someone had to work the factories. Oh we talk about how it was a great stride forward for women's liberty and feminism... but it wasn't. Economics dictated it happen... it's just that other people took credit for it.
In fact, with only a very few exceptions, economics created the circumstances in which these movements happened, and while we pat ourselves on the back and elevate our heroes... their names and actions would not have been possible, or remembered, without the backing of money. There's a reason economics is listed under the social sciences, not the physical; Because it really is all about people. You want to understand a society -- follow the money.
The fact is, America has never been a strong cultural center for the world. We are an economic power, not a cultural one. Our diplomats are predator drones and stealth bombers... not because we're excessively militant but because military power is cheap when you have a large class of poor people. We can mobilize millions to go fight proxy wars on behalf of our economic interests -- people talk about the high cost of the wars we've had, but compared to how much money we rake in from international trade, it's chump change.
Until that changes; Until America has culture, not just money and rationalizations derived from it, you won't see very many idealists getting very far in this society. We have the same potentiality in our people as the people of any other country; But we're squandering it because right now, America's business... is business.
So, what you're saying is that Walter White did it right in Breaking Bad when he hired Saul with a rather large retainer.
I'd have to actually turn on a TV to be able to answer that. I'm dimly aware there's some bald guy with a beard on some TV show called 'Breaking Bad' that everyone goes on about on Facebook, and that it has something to do with drugs. But beyond that, I couldn't tell you anything about the show. The only things on TV I watch are Mythbusters, Shark Week when it rolls around, How Things Work, Engineering Marvels, and similar. I used to watch the History channel, back when it actually had stuff about history on it. Now it seems to be as much about History as the Food channel is about food. I think I could probably watch it for the better part of a day before figuring out how to boil water. -_-
Snark aside though... if this 'Walter White' guy is mass producing drugs for a TV show, the odds are very, very good that the producers have given a highly slanted perspective on how drugs are actually made and distributed, because the day to day is actually quite boring for the people involved... and they don't make as much money as you seem to think either. The drug cartels are, just like regular supra-corporate entities, screwing over their workers and wealth and power tends to be concentrated at the top. It is unlikely a single man producing his own drugs, regardless of the type of drug, could manage production, packaging, distribution, etc., and not attract the attention of these entities. And they don't react like normal businesses do to a newcomer to the market; They tend to show up and either kill you where you stand, or offer you a deal where you basically work for them for next to nothing... or they kill you where you stand.
And all of this ignores law enforcement activity and the peripheral risks, which I'm sure are glorified and hollywooded up in the above-referenced series... but in actuality, there aren't catchy one liners, and dark meetings in alleyways or restaurants with tattooed latino guys with guns, or white guys in suits like in Batman. Conversation and plot is severely lacking in real life... it all revolves around people dying, people not wanting to die, and both sides doing whatever seems best to achieve those respective aims. The conversation, when it happens, tends to be short, to the point, and not particularly noteworthy or quotable. Something to the effect of "You mother fuck--(bang)gggrhhnnggggrrrhhhhh... *gurgle* wrrrrrrr... *wheeze* *gurgle* whyyyyyy? *gurgle* *splat*" Like I said, not particularly quotable.
'd also point out that netbooks do NOT use tons of power and
... It's not the netbook per-se that sucks your wallet dry. It's the power brick. As long as it's connected, it's vampirically sucking juice, and depending on its efficiency rating and power correction factor. PCF is the reason why running your fridge is so expensive -- it doesn't consume as much electricity as your bill says it does, but whenever you put something across the rails that is an inductor (transformer, motor, etc.) the voltage and current come out of phase -- you are charged based on how much current you're using at any point in time, as the meter measures amperage across it, not voltage drop. So running electrical motors can cost you a lot. That's why at most industrial factories you will find a large electrical motor next to the mains that just sits there all day, spinning. It won't be connected to anything, except maybe an exhaust fan; It is a syncronization motor, and its sole purpose is to match phase with the mains and correct for any phase shifting caused by equipment in the plant. For something like an aluminum smelting plant, if this engine, which performs literally no actual work, breaks down it is a bigger plant emergency than any other single piece of equipment breaking because of this simple glitch in how meters work.
Your netbook may sip electricity... but the power brick it's connected to is probably nothing more than a transformer with a fat ass capacitor and a half-bridge rectifier in it. And that's what's gonna bleed you.
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
No, he has the bitcoin equivalent of 600,000; Not 600,000 actual coins. The coins themselves are divisible.. so he has a crapton of fractions of coins, adding up to a total of 600,000.
Now what consequence would this be for the bitcoin as a currency, when a significant chunk of its coins are taken our of the equation? It's about 5% of the current total number of almost 12 million bitcoin in existence (and 3% of the theoretical maximum of 21 mln)
Umm, bad news: As of this submission, there were 11,800,375 coins created so far. The "theoretical maximum" is 21 million coins, yes, but you forgot each coin is divisible by https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#21_million_coins_isn.27t_enough.3B_doesn.27t_scale
">100,000,000. So in actuality, there are 2,099,999,997,690,000 units of currency that can be traded without modification to the current protocol. What most people don't understand about bitcoin is that even if a few coins here and there fall out of circulation, or even more than a few, so long as there are a sufficient number of atomic currency units available for trade, the system will function perfectly. Trading in bitcoins is more like trading in company stock than in actual currency -- they can be divided, aggregated, etc., etc. A bitcoin is, at the protocol level, just a token for a massive transactional log called the 'block chain'. It doesn't matter how many bitcoins are generated, or how many fall out of circulation, as long as enough remain in circulation to cover the transactions since the last block in the chain was created.
Another thing of note, is that apparently a single bitcoin user managed to amass 5% of the total number of that currency in existence. Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash. Smaller quantities have that potential already.
That person is now no longer a person, but a government. Just a minor footnote. Now, all that said, here's the thing about bitcoins... should we ever run out of them for whatever reason, we can always 'reset the clock' as it were -- start a new seed, a new block zero, and start building a new block chain from there. This isn't like IPv4 address space exhaustion; We just plug in a new seed and viola, Bitcoin Mark II.
Eeeh... all that said, I don't trade in bitcoins and I think the entire business is silly but if we're going to talk turkey, we should at least be accurate in our assessments.
There's not much chance of *all* of it disappearing it that way and the currency is infinitely divisible if required. There will always be enough.
Yeah... because we've never had problems with adding a crapton of floating point and extra decimal places to math with computers before. (rolls eyes) Please. Some of the greatest financial scams of our time were based on rounding and floating point errors. The idea that the currency can be "infinitely divisible" is not a selling point, it's a structural weakness.
But that is part of the game. You gut someones means and prosecute them so they can't defend themselves. That is the game the government plays.
Only with people dumb enough to not prepare ahead of time for this. This guy was 'new money'. He didn't know how to manage his assets, how to invest, how to setup multiple accounts, and didn't have the good sense to bond a lawyer ahead of time and give them limited power of attorney so they could coordinate his estate while he was in jail. See, this is what 'old money' does, and it means they get to hire entire bus loads of attorneys to show up at court, and the government can't do dick about it because they were bought and paid for ahead of time and are being funded out of accounts they can't seize or have access to because the money's been cleaned and separated from his personal accounts through shell corporations, etc.
Don't talk about how to play the game... this guy wasn't a player, he was a loser. He was setup from day one, by his own stupidity, to lose. If I was running a website like that, the very first thing I'd have done after getting ahead financially is separate out as much money as I could for future legal troubles, and hire accountants and lawyers so when the day came to save my sorry ass, all I'd have to do is just sit in jail and wait while Plan Bravo executed all on its own to spring me.
But, since the man was basically a walking cliche instead of a proper criminal or businessman or even passably decent nerd, I feel compelled to quote off his namesake:
"Do you hear that, Fezzik? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. The Man in Black makes it now."
in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins.
Yes, and given how badly he managed his assets, I doubt even a fraction of this will be recovered. He was not a very good businessman, his servers weren't very well secured... in fact the only thing in the "had lots of" category with this guy was ego. I mean really... "Dread Pirate Roberts"? And have you seen some of the things he wrote on this website of his? "I'll take as much of your money as I want because this is my ship. If you don't like it, fuck off." -- It's actually included in the criminal indictment against him, along with a laundry list of, shall we say, personality shortcomings of his leading to other elements of the criminal underground coming by to explain all meanings of the word "respect" to him, and then him blowing tons and tons of money either paying these people off, or trying (pathetically) to put hits out on them.
If there's one charge I could add to the indictment, it would be criminal stupidity.
It now comes out that those 26,000 Bitcoins aren't even Ulbricht's. Instead, they're actually from Silk Road's users. In other words, these were Bitcoins stored with user accounts on Silk Road.
Technically, they were for purchases pending. Silk road worked by letting you transfer coins into a silk road proxy account. It ran every submission through its "tumbler" to randomize which coins were actually used for which transactions. So what was seized was basically the day's take out of the register, as it were.
Ulbricht's actual wallet is separate from that, and was apparently encrypted, so it would appear that...
That he'll be charged as a terrorist and sequested in a room somewhere to be beaten with a metal pipe or waterboarded until he gives up the password. Has anyone heard from him lately?
And given that some courts have argued you can't be forced to give up your encryption, as it's a 5th Amendment violation...
We'll just create a new court especially to prosecute terrorists like him extrajudicially. Oh wait... we already did.
The article also notes that the FBI's own Bitcoin wallet has been identified, leading to some snarky micropayment messages headed their direction.
Taunting the police has historically worked out quite well for criminals. Dude, you aren't anonymous. You basically just signed your own search warrant.
Long week at work.
Fine. You get a pass this time mister, but I better see some real effort next time we meet.
Why don't more people object?
For the same reason he doesn't; You learn early in life if you stand up for what you believe in, authority will make an example out of you. So you learn to fly under the radar, and cherish those precious few moments in life when you can do good without being punished.
It's youthful idealism to think people will risk their freedom, their home, their financial security, their family, to combat an injustice. Especially against a vastly better equipped adversary like a large corporation with an excessively-sized legal department and millions or billions of dollars to burn... and full access to a legal system that can take away everything you own and away from everyone you know, at the snap of a gavel.
The few people who can't give up their idealism to become "successful" (that is, capitulate to the demands of the dominant social institutions of their era) very rarely manage to achieve social change -- the Ghandis and Martin Luther Kings to the Che Guevaras, etc., in a socially acceptable fashion. The majority simply become homeless, outcast from the system, develop mental or physical illness, and die early, and generally alone. And then there's the extreme fringe that, so frustrated by an inability to accomplish anything, take themselves out of the picture in a hailstorm of bullets or fire. Terrorism can promote social change, though it's politically unpopular to say this.
But as you can see... idealism is not particularly practical, which is why few people practice it except in small doses.
MasterCard is joining the FIDO Alliance, signaling that the payment network is getting interested in using fingerprints and other biometric data to identify people for
the purposes of targetted advertising and because the government asked them to provide more ways of tracking people with rfid, massive databases of biometric data, cell phones, etc. We can always say it's for "fraud protection", in the same way that those automated messages say "this call is being recorded for your protection." O RLY? Pretty sure you meant to say our. -_-
Please. By adding new standards like this they're helping to lock out competition from places like Paypal or the extensive wire fund transfer systems in place in Europe. "Ah! Well, now you need biometrics to make transactions in this country, or with these vendors. It's Everywhere You Want To Be (the Visa slogan) is starting to sound less like a convenience and more like a crazy ex stalking you.
They would never lie to us.
Yeah... about that... while I can't find the text of that leaked XBox memo because Microsoft has been busy suing and scrubbing it off google search results, it's pretty clear that their definition of not lying is basically telling half-truths, white lies, and spin control. Like, for example, "Xbox One Kinect Is Not Built For Advertising" ... well in the strict MicrosoftieSpeak(tm) sense, that's correct; it was built for entertainment. The fact that it's loaded down with a fuckton of advertising is just, you know, an extra 'feature'.
It would help to add credibility to your argument by not getting some basic facts incorrect. For starters, Schwartz was not a student at MIT. For another, the overseeing prosecutor and main face of the legal action against him was a woman, Carmen Ortiz. If you want to be taken seriously next time, some basic research on your part is in order.
Oh, I'm sorry... I only remember important details like how some kid corpsified, because of an overzealous prosecutor, and the morality of doing so. If I tripped up on the insignificant part like where he was from, and whether the prosecutor's genitals were on the inside, or the outside... oh. fucking. well.
If you want to be taken seriously next time, focusing on the actual meat of the argument rather than the irrelvant details is in order.
Thanks, that helps clear things up.
I make a pretty good funny, and your retort is this? I'm disappointed.
choice of OS on other devices can only be a good thing
BAD OR MISSING NTLDR. CANNOT CALL 911.
Abort/retry/ignore? _
Have you actually read your own posts in this thread?
No, I turned the monitor off and pressed tab 5 times and then enter when I was done. Why do you ask?
so change it to the multi-verse being a closed system, and you are back at a perpetual motion machine.
There are not enough Picards on the internet to facepalm this.
I'm talking about the RT-N66U, with the latest stable version of DD-WRT; v24-SP2, July 2013 release. Through trial and error, I've found the max before the load average causes it to start choking and delaying packets is about 1300 connections, with a TCP timeout of 900 and a UDP timeout of 60. Note that these numbers are far below what the 'out of the box' defaults are. Those defaults may work if you are not using QoS, but if latency and buffer bloat is a concern of yours, then you're going to find it chokes at a much lower threshold than the documentation and online reports suggest.
It's hardly a surprise to me that a CPU running at 300mhz might have problems shaping more than a few mbits/s of traffic.. hell even with the overclocking tweaked to nearly double speed and the damn thing hot enough you could cook an egg on it, it still can't handle the load for very long. This is entirely CPU bottleneck, there's plenty of memory and plenty of I/O available.
Huh. It's like you're having an argument with someone who made a post vaguely similar to mine. Well, have fun with that.
Ah, the ad hominid with a side of snark. The time-tested way of letting everyone on the internet know you just went full retard.