If people want to get other people to pick up bombs in a parking lot that go off later, USB sticks are only one of many vectors and has nothing to do with the issues on this thread: which is *digital* security threat vectors introduced by foreign usb sticks.
In my opinion, BTC would most likely be considered a mediation tool for bartering, and you are *supposed* to pay taxes on bartered income: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html (You could consider that another barter mediation tool is a legal contract which describes and commits two parties to the exchange of services rendered to each other with no currency being exchanged -- this is also a very taxable instrument). Valuing the latter would be harder than valuing the former, so from IRS perspective seems like BTC isn't a big deal.
I think the IRS (in the US) would be just fine if you got paid in BTC's and calculated the exchange rate properly to US dollars when you are paid. So long as you pay your Sched C taxes on your actual BTC income as it would have been in USD according to the appropriate barter valuation.
Assuming you're actually asking those questions in seriousness..
In that case, how can I pull the exact same binary off a data CD twice? Say an executable file? What's the difference between an audio CD that I rip a binary WAV file off of and a data CD that I rip binary executable off of? Seems like they are the same to my (uneducated) mind.. Either I can get bit-for-bit accuracy or I can't? Or are audio CD's uniformly so crappy in manufacture that you can't get bit-for-bit reads off any of them?
Why would ripping the same binary WAV off a CD result in a different hash each time? Is it b/c the encoders are different in different applications or what? If I rip the same song with CD-EX using the same settings won't I get the same exact binary assuming no read errors? I'm honestly curious what point you're making..
But the way Google/Apple/Amazon might tell you is with an RIIA subpoena.. with an option to pay a fine or show up in court. Seems like an ineffective way to scrub a collection.
Are there any inertial bombs out there that can cause serious damage to large naval vessels? Seems like the real danger is a harpoon-type exploding missile or a 15" shell with an armor piercing head and explosive body? Apparently both of which can be affected by a laser of this type. I saw an impressive Israeli video a couple years ago where they were shooting down *mortar and artillery rounds* in flight with a laser - which makes a lot of sense if you're Israel..
Take away the explosive body and can a 15" shell sink a large ship? I really don't know - so that's a real question. I'm sure it can cause a lot of damage, but if opfor can only fire dead weight at you and you're sending explosives the other direction.. Also maybe a laser like this can fragment an inertial projectile to further reduce it's damage potential?
Good point - I was thinking the same thing. Pay $100k to the extortionist and $400k to increase security. Next year, call the FBI (the modern of equiv of a dead dog?)
Yeah - I'm really interested to see if WebRTC combined with the Mozilla "Verified Email" incubator project gets us away from the server owns my identity world of today.. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity
Seems like then all you need the servers for are to issue short-lived identity certificates and host public keys to verify the certs. Then we could do some interesting browser to browser tech without having servers to authenticate every step.. Some interesting P2P tools could emerge. Hmm.
Apple may just be the DEC of this decade? But since this decade is just getting started, they may make a whole pile of money before "open wins." and I don't think DEC had to go out of business and Apple will have history to help them guide their future decisions.
Apple has been smart by not being tied down to a particular "layer" in the profits (the "value chain" as I think Geoff Moore calls it). So they've made a pile on their laptops for awhile, and now they're making an even bigger pile on their consumer electronic products. All with relatively closed ecosystems. Maybe that's a permanent win and closed will beat open, but I do suspect that open will continue to chase Apple and others up the value chain. Which is great since we'll get more and more great products from Apple as they innovate. And we'll get lesser (quality and profit) open products underneath them for the foreseeable future?
Wait you think currency's value is based on its utility for paying taxes? I'm not economist but this sounds so upside down I have to write to question the assertion? Currency is a representation of work and/or barter. The US currency is currently not all that different from bitcoin, except it's backed by an army, nuclear missiles and a bunch of powerful corporations? Oh, and also backed by the belief that the currency has value in the minds of lots of people around the world (related to the former points).
If a major country adopted bitcoin as it's national digital currency it would probably have a lot of value. Whether the value of bitcoins today is related to its future along those lines. So I agree we're probably in a bubble, but it's hard to say how big the bubble can grow.
Great post. And news flash: closed, proprietary systems generate massive profits for their owners.
So true. Jim Whitehurst from RedHat said this to me last year -- RedHat as an OS is installed in 20% of the enterprise servers in the world (remember his stats as told to me verbally). RedHat makes 2% of the profits of the enterprise server vendors. So the other 80% of the servers' OS's are generating 98% of the profit in the industry. He also said that if you look at all the $100B+ valued companies in the world, you see a large number of software / enterprise companies b/c it's just so darned profitable. Apple it appears has cracked that same nut in the consumer electronics space (which Microsoft had done to a large extent on the home computer market which is now a fading industry it appears).
Anyway - great food for thought - thanks for sharing those links and idea.
I guess so, but I think there are all these things call "advertisements" in mags and on billboards that feature semi-naked chicks selling perfume, watches, cars and beer. So it may not be technical advertisement, but that's the word we're stuck with to describe those things. The ads are certainly not there to let us know of the existence of those watches and beer, they are to a) get noticed; b) generate interest/arousal; c) cause us to change our buying pattern/decisions as a result. In that sense it's marketing - so I think you're making a good point, but I think the words you're using to distinguish between the two concepts don't work.
Google isn't really equipped to solve this problem. They're in the business of getting it right "most of the time" or giving the best answer it can find, whether or not it's appropriate. They do a remarkably good job but sometimes they get it very wrong.
In a kids-only website you have to curate the content somehow with trusted editors, b/c you can't afford even one mistake (the way at least in the US kids are protected by law and politics). So Google isn't a good fit.
There is a site recently bought by Disney called Togetherville that solves the problem in an interesting way. You basically use your facebook social network as a kind of oauth/openid for your kids. You pick out people from your social network who you say are "trusted" to play with your kids online. Then the kids get access to these people in a controlled environment, to share videos, and do whatever you might want to do in a little social network sandbox..
I think it's a clever idea of making child-adult-internet resource authorization simple for parents (and outsourcing a lot of the tech and mgmt to FB), and apparently so did Disney. And it's cool that it doesn't require a traditional internet filter or any kind of content white list. It's just a way of managing a list of adults who aren't going to let your kids get into hot water. Put the onus on the parent's judgment of their relationships, which is exactly how it works in the real world.
Yeah exactly. It's just question of how much it costs to buy off iCloud Comm. If these guys want $500k to go away, then the paperwork is probably already being inked. I'd guess this company just sees an opportunity to move a little wealth across the table and also ensure they have an agreement to prevent apple from suing them later..
Yeah for sure. I should have said that you made good points up front. I was just trying to contribute, but there is so much stupid sniping on/. that it doesn't go without saying!
Architecture is hard. Or more correctly, choosing the "correct" architecture is hard. If you pick the architecture well, implementation may be time consuming but hopefully isn't "hard."
Thanks - great comment. Can you answer the more general question as to what happened to unbundling? I talked with the FCC team who were responsible for the infrastructure work on NBP last year, and they just totally wrote it off -- "Unbundling? Yeah right, it'll destroy the industry if we do that."
What went wrong after 1996? We had unbundling for a few years and now it's totally verboten. Regulatory capture? Anything legal that's taken us down this road? Thanks for any insight.
Thanks - very helpful. If I can impose further, why do you think Goog/MSFT/Yhoo did this then? Seems like a total slap in the face to W3C and their RDFa working group - and presumably they did this in total secret without involving W3C or any public standards body at all.. What's the motivation/advantage for them to do this? (I can guess that once deciding to do it they did it in secret so as to not get shouted down half way through).
I know a lot of people complain that RDFa is "too complicated" and I'll admit that when I've tried to read the docs I get confused b/c of lack of practical examples that I can just "monkey-see/monkey-do" with -- (at least last time I checked their docs). But could that be an actual reason for three giant corps to go their own way? Any thoughts on that or what else is driving this?
Good comments - thanks. You sound like someone who could help me: what's the difference between microformats and microdata? I thought the two were synonymous until this recent announcement and now lots of people are talking about them as if they are different. I've been googling but the conversation still seems pretty confused. What I think I make out is that microdata is a specific implementation of using microformats, designed to handle many use-cases that RDFa handles for the web?
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If people want to get other people to pick up bombs in a parking lot that go off later, USB sticks are only one of many vectors and has nothing to do with the issues on this thread: which is *digital* security threat vectors introduced by foreign usb sticks.
In my opinion, BTC would most likely be considered a mediation tool for bartering, and you are *supposed* to pay taxes on bartered income: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html (You could consider that another barter mediation tool is a legal contract which describes and commits two parties to the exchange of services rendered to each other with no currency being exchanged -- this is also a very taxable instrument). Valuing the latter would be harder than valuing the former, so from IRS perspective seems like BTC isn't a big deal.
I think the IRS (in the US) would be just fine if you got paid in BTC's and calculated the exchange rate properly to US dollars when you are paid. So long as you pay your Sched C taxes on your actual BTC income as it would have been in USD according to the appropriate barter valuation.
Assuming you're actually asking those questions in seriousness..
A senior exec at IBM recently claimed to me that IBM brings in over $1B/year on patent licensing agreements.
Honest question: does prior art requirements go away in "first to file" systems?
In that case, how can I pull the exact same binary off a data CD twice? Say an executable file? What's the difference between an audio CD that I rip a binary WAV file off of and a data CD that I rip binary executable off of? Seems like they are the same to my (uneducated) mind.. Either I can get bit-for-bit accuracy or I can't? Or are audio CD's uniformly so crappy in manufacture that you can't get bit-for-bit reads off any of them?
Why would ripping the same binary WAV off a CD result in a different hash each time? Is it b/c the encoders are different in different applications or what? If I rip the same song with CD-EX using the same settings won't I get the same exact binary assuming no read errors? I'm honestly curious what point you're making..
But the way Google/Apple/Amazon might tell you is with an RIIA subpoena.. with an option to pay a fine or show up in court. Seems like an ineffective way to scrub a collection.
Are there any inertial bombs out there that can cause serious damage to large naval vessels? Seems like the real danger is a harpoon-type exploding missile or a 15" shell with an armor piercing head and explosive body? Apparently both of which can be affected by a laser of this type. I saw an impressive Israeli video a couple years ago where they were shooting down *mortar and artillery rounds* in flight with a laser - which makes a lot of sense if you're Israel..
Take away the explosive body and can a 15" shell sink a large ship? I really don't know - so that's a real question. I'm sure it can cause a lot of damage, but if opfor can only fire dead weight at you and you're sending explosives the other direction.. Also maybe a laser like this can fragment an inertial projectile to further reduce it's damage potential?
Good point - I was thinking the same thing. Pay $100k to the extortionist and $400k to increase security. Next year, call the FBI (the modern of equiv of a dead dog?)
Yeah - I'm really interested to see if WebRTC combined with the Mozilla "Verified Email" incubator project gets us away from the server owns my identity world of today.. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity
Seems like then all you need the servers for are to issue short-lived identity certificates and host public keys to verify the certs. Then we could do some interesting browser to browser tech without having servers to authenticate every step.. Some interesting P2P tools could emerge. Hmm.
Apple may just be the DEC of this decade? But since this decade is just getting started, they may make a whole pile of money before "open wins." and I don't think DEC had to go out of business and Apple will have history to help them guide their future decisions.
Apple has been smart by not being tied down to a particular "layer" in the profits (the "value chain" as I think Geoff Moore calls it). So they've made a pile on their laptops for awhile, and now they're making an even bigger pile on their consumer electronic products. All with relatively closed ecosystems. Maybe that's a permanent win and closed will beat open, but I do suspect that open will continue to chase Apple and others up the value chain. Which is great since we'll get more and more great products from Apple as they innovate. And we'll get lesser (quality and profit) open products underneath them for the foreseeable future?
Wait you think currency's value is based on its utility for paying taxes? I'm not economist but this sounds so upside down I have to write to question the assertion? Currency is a representation of work and/or barter. The US currency is currently not all that different from bitcoin, except it's backed by an army, nuclear missiles and a bunch of powerful corporations? Oh, and also backed by the belief that the currency has value in the minds of lots of people around the world (related to the former points).
If a major country adopted bitcoin as it's national digital currency it would probably have a lot of value. Whether the value of bitcoins today is related to its future along those lines. So I agree we're probably in a bubble, but it's hard to say how big the bubble can grow.
Some coins are presumably lost as with all currency. Picayune point, but hey I'm on /.
Great post. And news flash: closed, proprietary systems generate massive profits for their owners.
So true. Jim Whitehurst from RedHat said this to me last year -- RedHat as an OS is installed in 20% of the enterprise servers in the world (remember his stats as told to me verbally). RedHat makes 2% of the profits of the enterprise server vendors. So the other 80% of the servers' OS's are generating 98% of the profit in the industry. He also said that if you look at all the $100B+ valued companies in the world, you see a large number of software / enterprise companies b/c it's just so darned profitable. Apple it appears has cracked that same nut in the consumer electronics space (which Microsoft had done to a large extent on the home computer market which is now a fading industry it appears).
Anyway - great food for thought - thanks for sharing those links and idea.
Oh count on it.
I guess so, but I think there are all these things call "advertisements" in mags and on billboards that feature semi-naked chicks selling perfume, watches, cars and beer. So it may not be technical advertisement, but that's the word we're stuck with to describe those things. The ads are certainly not there to let us know of the existence of those watches and beer, they are to a) get noticed; b) generate interest/arousal; c) cause us to change our buying pattern/decisions as a result. In that sense it's marketing - so I think you're making a good point, but I think the words you're using to distinguish between the two concepts don't work.
Google isn't really equipped to solve this problem. They're in the business of getting it right "most of the time" or giving the best answer it can find, whether or not it's appropriate. They do a remarkably good job but sometimes they get it very wrong.
In a kids-only website you have to curate the content somehow with trusted editors, b/c you can't afford even one mistake (the way at least in the US kids are protected by law and politics). So Google isn't a good fit.
There is a site recently bought by Disney called Togetherville that solves the problem in an interesting way. You basically use your facebook social network as a kind of oauth/openid for your kids. You pick out people from your social network who you say are "trusted" to play with your kids online. Then the kids get access to these people in a controlled environment, to share videos, and do whatever you might want to do in a little social network sandbox..
I think it's a clever idea of making child-adult-internet resource authorization simple for parents (and outsourcing a lot of the tech and mgmt to FB), and apparently so did Disney. And it's cool that it doesn't require a traditional internet filter or any kind of content white list. It's just a way of managing a list of adults who aren't going to let your kids get into hot water. Put the onus on the parent's judgment of their relationships, which is exactly how it works in the real world.
Yeah exactly. It's just question of how much it costs to buy off iCloud Comm. If these guys want $500k to go away, then the paperwork is probably already being inked. I'd guess this company just sees an opportunity to move a little wealth across the table and also ensure they have an agreement to prevent apple from suing them later..
Yeah for sure. I should have said that you made good points up front. I was just trying to contribute, but there is so much stupid sniping on /. that it doesn't go without saying!
Architecture is hard. Or more correctly, choosing the "correct" architecture is hard. If you pick the architecture well, implementation may be time consuming but hopefully isn't "hard."
Oh snap!
Thanks - great comment. Can you answer the more general question as to what happened to unbundling? I talked with the FCC team who were responsible for the infrastructure work on NBP last year, and they just totally wrote it off -- "Unbundling? Yeah right, it'll destroy the industry if we do that."
What went wrong after 1996? We had unbundling for a few years and now it's totally verboten. Regulatory capture? Anything legal that's taken us down this road? Thanks for any insight.
Thanks - very helpful. If I can impose further, why do you think Goog/MSFT/Yhoo did this then? Seems like a total slap in the face to W3C and their RDFa working group - and presumably they did this in total secret without involving W3C or any public standards body at all.. What's the motivation/advantage for them to do this? (I can guess that once deciding to do it they did it in secret so as to not get shouted down half way through).
I know a lot of people complain that RDFa is "too complicated" and I'll admit that when I've tried to read the docs I get confused b/c of lack of practical examples that I can just "monkey-see/monkey-do" with -- (at least last time I checked their docs). But could that be an actual reason for three giant corps to go their own way? Any thoughts on that or what else is driving this?
Hear hear. I don't have to like it but I'm going to have to live with it. And if FB hops onto this bandwagon, it's totally finito.
Good comments - thanks. You sound like someone who could help me: what's the difference between microformats and microdata? I thought the two were synonymous until this recent announcement and now lots of people are talking about them as if they are different. I've been googling but the conversation still seems pretty confused. What I think I make out is that microdata is a specific implementation of using microformats, designed to handle many use-cases that RDFa handles for the web?
Any help would be appreciated..