Heh, I remember using Computer Narcotics back in the 90's. At the very least there's a nice placebo effect. The guy who wrote CN was actually blind and had a BBS. Cool guy.
It's still on some shareware sites, but you need dosbox to run it on your modern win/mac/linux computer.
I found this list of more sound and light fun. Music and visuals are definitely a mental stimulant. But Oklahoma is off their rocker;) They should ban whisky and cousins instead.
Not to mention security. I mean, you thought Tempest was bad before, now I can wirelessly sniff and alter PCI traffic, which is a direct conduit into the RAM.
Believe in it and it will serve you. Each CPU can create coins in relation to the total CPU of the currency. Thus the more people involved who are not stealing means more safety.
It's actually a fallacy that the number of "coins" or whatever has ANYTHING to do with the viability of a currency. A currency is a medium of information exchange. The number of "coins" imparts a certain amount of "bandwidth" if you will on the ability of an economy to transfer value (goods and services) between parties in "transactions". The money is not what's important. It's the goods and services. The only thing money needs to have is A. a measurable difficulty to create more and B. a way to make sure it hasn't been spent in more than one place. With digital currency, B. is the more important thing. This protocol or currency solves it by using a P2P client to connect to as many other users of the currency as possible to ask them if they have possession of the coin that someone else claims to own and is sending to you. The safety comes from numbers--the more people you ask, the higher the probability that you're receiving real value. It's sort of like if you had to ask everyone if they had a dollar bill with a certain serial number. Then, you could easily tell if it was counterfeit or not. Unfortunately, beyond counterfeiting the problem is that most money ALREADY is digital but relies on much less secure and much more heirarchial methods to verify this stuff. SO basically, you could ask 1000 people on bitcoin about a coin or if you're using a USD you're basically trusting the federal reserve and a handful of big banks that there is some value on the other side of that dollar somewhere.
Yeah, what I would ask is "Were you BORN with money in a little wallet?" No. At some point we meet someone who has some and then we trade them something for it. Or receive some as a gift. There are some gift sites out there giving away free bitcoins. Be more open minded. No one wants to believe that their dollars in their bank accounts aren't worth anything. But they aren't. It's all an idea we're confident in. In bitcoin's case, the idea to be confident in is A. How easy it is to generate a new bitcoin B. How many people you can ask if a bitcoin has been spent already. C. If a bitcoin is double-spent, how do you determine who was first.
I think that it would be pretty easy to make this thing a lot more robust with a solid multicast protocol (IPv6 should have plenty of multicast space) and solid, mesh networking that isn't controlled by anyone. After that it's a matter of bandwidth once all 21M coins are made. And of course, there's no reason someone else can't come along and make a better currency, just like you're free to use USD, Canadian $, Rupees, Pounds, gold dust, cocaine, etc. wherever you shop. It's just about whether they take them..
No coins have value. They have tender, that is they can carry value across distances.
Money in any form is just energy--a signal of value being transferred. There needs to be as many divisible information packets (currency units) in the system as there are transactions at any given instant. The bitcoin system only allows 21M bitcoins. The rate at which the bitcoins can be created is halved every four years. At the point that 21M are created, goods prices will start to fall because people will need to divide their bitcoins to have enough to do all the transactions they want.
Most of what we do nowadays is digital. Every time you swipe a card you're just connection to a hierarchy of banks controlled by only a few people instead of asking hundreds or thousands or millions of other people if the bitcoin in question is already spent.
So, your instant gratification is basically you putting your trust that it's someone else's problem. Guess what, banks are spending your dollars while they are in transit. It's called "float". If you're happy with other getting goods for doing essentially nothing (in fact, printing up vouchers for goods as they wish), then you don't have to support it. But when I'm cashing in one bitcoin to pay $1000000USD in income tax, you'll wish you'd got on sooner. Read the article first next time. This IS slashdot though.
Yeah, but the only way they can control it is to cut people off from the network, i.e. a total police state. This is America, we've always done things more creatively. Bank drafts are nothing new. Do you think a check is any more official than this? The only difference is that banks generally deal in USD which makes them beholden to certain rules of the Federal Reserve. Likewise, the IRS expects it's money in USD. That doesn't mean you can't make fake money and trade it, you just need to convert it to the USD value at the end of the year according to the IRS rules and then pay taxes on it. Since this is basically converting raw electrical energy into a commodity, you aren't making income if you make bitcoins, so what do they care?
Now, if we were in some other country with a corrupt government who only wanted a monopoly on currency so they could counterfeit it then they might try to shut this down. As it is, it's actually a good idea. With IPv6 multicast and a worldwide mesh network, it could almost work. The only real risk in the model is the ability to crack the encryption (SHA 256) and the bandwidth to transmit every transaction to every person. Luckly, we have the same fundamental problem today with our current currency and it seems to work out. For instance, I don't need to know immediately if Joe Shmoe trades 1 bitcoin for a soda in New Jersey.
Read the paper and prepare to be fascinated. I think this is definitely closer to the world in Snow Crash where the problem of money is solved. It really could be solved with computers, and this is a decent approximation of the beginning of it. Yes, government might be less relevant, but a stable currency means everyone wins. And in America, we own the government, so I think we have a choice.
Why don't they just update ntp to work better? I mean, it seems ntp already has the necessary mechanisms to transport time and latency messages. Why not just update ntpd to have a "super accurate average" mode?
I hope the answer isn't one of the usual, unsaid ones around Unix geeks:
1. They didn't bother to try to talk to the NTP people. 2. The NTP people told them to get off their lawn and they got butt hurt and went off to make their own time protocol. 3. There really is some flaw in ntp that makes it bad at this and the solution is worth patching literally every network device in the world.
Just have a unique UID for each user in the company.. Start at 10000. Store in LDAP using posixuser schema. Use nsswitch to direct/etc/passwd to ldap. Problem solved.
Exactly, everyone here from the USA has unprecedented freedom to do almost anything they want right now. And the fact that we're spending it on Slashdot instead of making something means we're complacent. I guess in a certain sense I'm exerting my freedom to slack off, but with so many possibilities why am I choosing this non-productive one?
I think this is a really exciting project because it's the first in a long line of possibilities to take whole-sky digital movies. You could conceivably add more of these arrays to the four corners of the globe and have a whole sky image even more frequently, up to daily. Then it's just a matter of "how deep" into space you're looking, and that's where the resolution comes in. More megapixels per frame means they can use a wider focal length to see a given depth into space. The next step after you reach the daily image is to put arrays in orbit around the sun, 6 total and have a real 3d view of space. We're only in the beginning. If they had spent what they've spent on Iraq and Afghanistan on this, we would already have this. We need to get our priorities straight before we stagnate as a species. We need "future occupations" once the solar and geothermal powered robots are taking care of our food, homes, and everything else we need to survive. "Jobless recovery" means this is coming far faster than anyone wants to think.
Yeah, exactly. The whole PC market was built on choice and freedom. Apple has always been about living in the Apple box, and getting some benefits like easier setup at the expense of being in a monoculture..
Although Apple has made some innovations, mainly on the design side, a lot of their innovations fail as well (Firewire?).. The PC has done far more to improve productivity, and the business of computers. If you're in the computer business, you owe it to the PC. Whereas if Apple had won, we would all be working for Apple.
Microsoft, for it's evil, was always just a publishing company. Apple is the tool of the publishing companies. They want to do away with the web, and replace it with a big "App Store". They don't want you to get stuff for free on the web any more. Anyway, the bottom line is that Apple is still swimming upstream. I'm surprised they made as much money with the iPod as they did, but I think that had as much to do with the economic bubble as it did the product. People with a extra money buy nice things, and Apple makes nice things. But not everyone can drive a Porsche, and that will be their eventual undoing, again.
I said a few months ago that APPL was a classic bubble, and the stock will never get over $275 and it still hasn't. People are getting tired of it, the novelty is wearing off, and they just want a cheap phone that does what they want it to do. I think the phone manufacturers have gotten the message and now it's up to the carriers to provide as much bandwidth as possible. Android and Windows Mobile are the long tail and RIM will continue to be the choice of the enterprise professional.
Apple are truly becoming the kings of rent-seeking and platform lock-in. It's far worse than anything Microsoft ever did.
Dude, that's how Apple has always been. Except when Steve left for a while. I think this is kindof his legacy, and I don't think he has a lot of time so he's going full-bore for the brass ring.
Microsoft was always about putting as many copies out there as possible. Apple wants to be the exclusive cult.
You don't have to use iAds, you do have to use it if you want to get paid by Apple. They are just preventing people from running out and making a bunch of ugly, confusing, possibly nefarious ads like the rest of the web. The app store is not the web, Steve says. He made a clear distinction between free content on the web and the premium, high-end brands on the app store. It's like a high-end mall. Anyone can advertise on iAds but since it takes a minimum of $500K and programming.
Whereas Google has cornered the small time market, and it would be useless to compete over the small-time, free internet with Google. Jobs is really trying to make a parallel-to-the-web, not-free (as in speech) platform for media content delivery. And not only that, he wants to control the production of the media as well from the camera to the end user. And he's betting that people will do it because it's "cool" and he's kinda already proven they will through iTunes.
If it succeeds, I have a feeling the web part of the phone/pad will kinda fade away. But the problem is that Apple thinks big, the reality distortion is in effect, and it's easy to forget that most people in the world don't have dough to spend on apps. And really, Apple's share is not that big, but it's growing. They've sold a few billion in cheap software, which is impressive.
But where's the long tail that will have this growth continue? Soon they'll have to give away iPhones because that's what Blackberry and Windows Mobile will do. Then they'll have to slash prices to keep up with the discount brands. Apple does not have competition when it comes to designing a high-end product, but from an economic perspective, they are going to have to get in bed with big media and HARD to stay alive.
Only the web can provide everything as soon as it's developed, for free, and in a way that is free to the producer of the content as well. And google is really the web, since it provides the gateway to that content. Now, I don't see how that's going to be as profitable as a media machine like Apple is making. But, they have the long tail. So Apple will have the high-end customers and Google/VZW and Microsoft will fight over the rest.
And the "iAds" themselves are mini apps that are in a layer over the current app and can be closed at any time. Definitely not a text link to a web page. Obviously Steve would rather keep people in the apps.
This reminds me a lot of my monitoring systems for servers. Of course, I use an active check for most stuff, but there are also passive checks that listen for a SNMP trap. Probably that's what this is. There's something important that someone wants to monitor. When it drops out, probably the monitoring device starts recording the message. We have something similar in the U.S. called the Emergency Broadcasting System. Interestingly, the EBS uses a non-automated system (at least it did when I was in radio). So basically you receive a signal from your upstream provider and then you send it out to your downstream people, and then whatever payload there is you send out on the air. It's all manual, the operator in the control room has to know how to do it. This sounds like something similar. The odd thing is the constant carrier. That can get expensive. So it must be something really important, or they use it for other calibrations or orientations.
Obviously, it could be a spy thing also, it wouldn't be surprising at all. If it's stopped, it's not a big of a problem as if there were a lot of messages;) Anyway, rest assured the NSA is hard at work and knows much more than you.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I remember using Computer Narcotics back in the 90's. At the very least there's a nice placebo effect. The guy who wrote CN was actually blind and had a BBS. Cool guy.
It's still on some shareware sites, but you need dosbox to run it on your modern win/mac/linux computer.
I found this list of more sound and light fun. Music and visuals are definitely a mental stimulant. But Oklahoma is off their rocker ;) They should ban whisky and cousins instead.
Not to mention security. I mean, you thought Tempest was bad before, now I can wirelessly sniff and alter PCI traffic, which is a direct conduit into the RAM.
Here's what I saw when I read your post:
"But I thought girls didn't poop. Now my illusion is shattered."
Stevegee58 grasped the shiny brown log in his fist and the slowly raised it under his nose.
*sniff*
We're poo of a kind!
Yeah, it's Time to put a stop to all this Us and Them. These repeated lawsuits just sound like Echoes to me. It's A Great Day for Freedom.
Believe in it and it will serve you. Each CPU can create coins in relation to the total CPU of the currency. Thus the more people involved who are not stealing means more safety.
It's actually a fallacy that the number of "coins" or whatever has ANYTHING to do with the viability of a currency. A currency is a medium of information exchange. The number of "coins" imparts a certain amount of "bandwidth" if you will on the ability of an economy to transfer value (goods and services) between parties in "transactions". The money is not what's important. It's the goods and services. The only thing money needs to have is A. a measurable difficulty to create more and B. a way to make sure it hasn't been spent in more than one place. With digital currency, B. is the more important thing. This protocol or currency solves it by using a P2P client to connect to as many other users of the currency as possible to ask them if they have possession of the coin that someone else claims to own and is sending to you. The safety comes from numbers--the more people you ask, the higher the probability that you're receiving real value. It's sort of like if you had to ask everyone if they had a dollar bill with a certain serial number. Then, you could easily tell if it was counterfeit or not. Unfortunately, beyond counterfeiting the problem is that most money ALREADY is digital but relies on much less secure and much more heirarchial methods to verify this stuff. SO basically, you could ask 1000 people on bitcoin about a coin or if you're using a USD you're basically trusting the federal reserve and a handful of big banks that there is some value on the other side of that dollar somewhere.
Yeah, what I would ask is "Were you BORN with money in a little wallet?" No. At some point we meet someone who has some and then we trade them something for it. Or receive some as a gift. There are some gift sites out there giving away free bitcoins. Be more open minded. No one wants to believe that their dollars in their bank accounts aren't worth anything. But they aren't. It's all an idea we're confident in. In bitcoin's case, the idea to be confident in is A. How easy it is to generate a new bitcoin B. How many people you can ask if a bitcoin has been spent already. C. If a bitcoin is double-spent, how do you determine who was first.
I think that it would be pretty easy to make this thing a lot more robust with a solid multicast protocol (IPv6 should have plenty of multicast space) and solid, mesh networking that isn't controlled by anyone. After that it's a matter of bandwidth once all 21M coins are made. And of course, there's no reason someone else can't come along and make a better currency, just like you're free to use USD, Canadian $, Rupees, Pounds, gold dust, cocaine, etc. wherever you shop. It's just about whether they take them..
No coins have value. They have tender, that is they can carry value across distances.
Money in any form is just energy--a signal of value being transferred. There needs to be as many divisible information packets (currency units) in the system as there are transactions at any given instant. The bitcoin system only allows 21M bitcoins. The rate at which the bitcoins can be created is halved every four years. At the point that 21M are created, goods prices will start to fall because people will need to divide their bitcoins to have enough to do all the transactions they want.
Most of what we do nowadays is digital. Every time you swipe a card you're just connection to a hierarchy of banks controlled by only a few people instead of asking hundreds or thousands or millions of other people if the bitcoin in question is already spent.
So, your instant gratification is basically you putting your trust that it's someone else's problem. Guess what, banks are spending your dollars while they are in transit. It's called "float". If you're happy with other getting goods for doing essentially nothing (in fact, printing up vouchers for goods as they wish), then you don't have to support it. But when I'm cashing in one bitcoin to pay $1000000USD in income tax, you'll wish you'd got on sooner. Read the article first next time. This IS slashdot though.
Yeah, but the only way they can control it is to cut people off from the network, i.e. a total police state. This is America, we've always done things more creatively. Bank drafts are nothing new. Do you think a check is any more official than this? The only difference is that banks generally deal in USD which makes them beholden to certain rules of the Federal Reserve. Likewise, the IRS expects it's money in USD. That doesn't mean you can't make fake money and trade it, you just need to convert it to the USD value at the end of the year according to the IRS rules and then pay taxes on it. Since this is basically converting raw electrical energy into a commodity, you aren't making income if you make bitcoins, so what do they care?
Now, if we were in some other country with a corrupt government who only wanted a monopoly on currency so they could counterfeit it then they might try to shut this down. As it is, it's actually a good idea. With IPv6 multicast and a worldwide mesh network, it could almost work. The only real risk in the model is the ability to crack the encryption (SHA 256) and the bandwidth to transmit every transaction to every person. Luckly, we have the same fundamental problem today with our current currency and it seems to work out. For instance, I don't need to know immediately if Joe Shmoe trades 1 bitcoin for a soda in New Jersey.
Read the paper and prepare to be fascinated. I think this is definitely closer to the world in Snow Crash where the problem of money is solved. It really could be solved with computers, and this is a decent approximation of the beginning of it. Yes, government might be less relevant, but a stable currency means everyone wins. And in America, we own the government, so I think we have a choice.
Plus there are rainbow tables for md5 common passwords.
Some of it is creative astro turfing. Like how Fox News used to put stuff in the form of a question (Is Obama a Socialist?).
It all boils down to a crude form of suggestion, which they hope people will repeat, and thus create more news.
What's weird is that it's so hard to pin down Murdoch's agenda, other than that he's an admitted fundamentalist christian.
Why don't they just update ntp to work better? I mean, it seems ntp already has the necessary mechanisms to transport time and latency messages. Why not just update ntpd to have a "super accurate average" mode?
I hope the answer isn't one of the usual, unsaid ones around Unix geeks:
1. They didn't bother to try to talk to the NTP people.
2. The NTP people told them to get off their lawn and they got butt hurt and went off to make their own time protocol.
3. There really is some flaw in ntp that makes it bad at this and the solution is worth patching literally every network device in the world.
Something tells me it's one of the former.
Just have a unique UID for each user in the company.. Start at 10000. Store in LDAP using posixuser schema. Use nsswitch to direct /etc/passwd to ldap. Problem solved.
There is no "The Internet". And the government will pry my routers from my cold, dead hands.
Mesh networking is also a solution. Why should I need to be isolated from say, my neighbors, because China is attacking U.S. Bank mainframes?
Exactly, everyone here from the USA has unprecedented freedom to do almost anything they want right now. And the fact that we're spending it on Slashdot instead of making something means we're complacent. I guess in a certain sense I'm exerting my freedom to slack off, but with so many possibilities why am I choosing this non-productive one?
I think this is a really exciting project because it's the first in a long line of possibilities to take whole-sky digital movies. You could conceivably add more of these arrays to the four corners of the globe and have a whole sky image even more frequently, up to daily. Then it's just a matter of "how deep" into space you're looking, and that's where the resolution comes in. More megapixels per frame means they can use a wider focal length to see a given depth into space. The next step after you reach the daily image is to put arrays in orbit around the sun, 6 total and have a real 3d view of space. We're only in the beginning. If they had spent what they've spent on Iraq and Afghanistan on this, we would already have this. We need to get our priorities straight before we stagnate as a species. We need "future occupations" once the solar and geothermal powered robots are taking care of our food, homes, and everything else we need to survive. "Jobless recovery" means this is coming far faster than anyone wants to think.
Yeah, exactly. The whole PC market was built on choice and freedom. Apple has always been about living in the Apple box, and getting some benefits like easier setup at the expense of being in a monoculture..
Although Apple has made some innovations, mainly on the design side, a lot of their innovations fail as well (Firewire?).. The PC has done far more to improve productivity, and the business of computers. If you're in the computer business, you owe it to the PC. Whereas if Apple had won, we would all be working for Apple.
Microsoft, for it's evil, was always just a publishing company. Apple is the tool of the publishing companies. They want to do away with the web, and replace it with a big "App Store". They don't want you to get stuff for free on the web any more. Anyway, the bottom line is that Apple is still swimming upstream. I'm surprised they made as much money with the iPod as they did, but I think that had as much to do with the economic bubble as it did the product. People with a extra money buy nice things, and Apple makes nice things. But not everyone can drive a Porsche, and that will be their eventual undoing, again.
I said a few months ago that APPL was a classic bubble, and the stock will never get over $275 and it still hasn't. People are getting tired of it, the novelty is wearing off, and they just want a cheap phone that does what they want it to do. I think the phone manufacturers have gotten the message and now it's up to the carriers to provide as much bandwidth as possible. Android and Windows Mobile are the long tail and RIM will continue to be the choice of the enterprise professional.
Apple are truly becoming the kings of rent-seeking and platform lock-in. It's far worse than anything Microsoft ever did.
Dude, that's how Apple has always been. Except when Steve left for a while. I think this is kindof his legacy, and I don't think he has a lot of time so he's going full-bore for the brass ring.
Microsoft was always about putting as many copies out there as possible. Apple wants to be the exclusive cult.
You don't have to use iAds, you do have to use it if you want to get paid by Apple. They are just preventing people from running out and making a bunch of ugly, confusing, possibly nefarious ads like the rest of the web. The app store is not the web, Steve says. He made a clear distinction between free content on the web and the premium, high-end brands on the app store. It's like a high-end mall. Anyone can advertise on iAds but since it takes a minimum of $500K and programming.
Whereas Google has cornered the small time market, and it would be useless to compete over the small-time, free internet with Google. Jobs is really trying to make a parallel-to-the-web, not-free (as in speech) platform for media content delivery. And not only that, he wants to control the production of the media as well from the camera to the end user. And he's betting that people will do it because it's "cool" and he's kinda already proven they will through iTunes.
If it succeeds, I have a feeling the web part of the phone/pad will kinda fade away. But the problem is that Apple thinks big, the reality distortion is in effect, and it's easy to forget that most people in the world don't have dough to spend on apps. And really, Apple's share is not that big, but it's growing. They've sold a few billion in cheap software, which is impressive.
But where's the long tail that will have this growth continue? Soon they'll have to give away iPhones because that's what Blackberry and Windows Mobile will do. Then they'll have to slash prices to keep up with the discount brands. Apple does not have competition when it comes to designing a high-end product, but from an economic perspective, they are going to have to get in bed with big media and HARD to stay alive.
Only the web can provide everything as soon as it's developed, for free, and in a way that is free to the producer of the content as well. And google is really the web, since it provides the gateway to that content. Now, I don't see how that's going to be as profitable as a media machine like Apple is making. But, they have the long tail. So Apple will have the high-end customers and Google/VZW and Microsoft will fight over the rest.
And the "iAds" themselves are mini apps that are in a layer over the current app and can be closed at any time. Definitely not a text link to a web page. Obviously Steve would rather keep people in the apps.
"A real patriot is the one who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works."
This reminds me a lot of my monitoring systems for servers. Of course, I use an active check for most stuff, but there are also passive checks that listen for a SNMP trap. Probably that's what this is. There's something important that someone wants to monitor. When it drops out, probably the monitoring device starts recording the message. We have something similar in the U.S. called the Emergency Broadcasting System. Interestingly, the EBS uses a non-automated system (at least it did when I was in radio). So basically you receive a signal from your upstream provider and then you send it out to your downstream people, and then whatever payload there is you send out on the air. It's all manual, the operator in the control room has to know how to do it. This sounds like something similar. The odd thing is the constant carrier. That can get expensive. So it must be something really important, or they use it for other calibrations or orientations.
Obviously, it could be a spy thing also, it wouldn't be surprising at all. If it's stopped, it's not a big of a problem as if there were a lot of messages ;) Anyway, rest assured the NSA is hard at work and knows much more than you.
Mom, Scareduck won't stop using periods too often!