A 20 second search reveals, for example, patents 5873737 and 6267602 issued before 2000. "Magnets to help electrically connect stuff" won't be specific enough for a patent, though... as with USB, the trick is in designing a specific plug and then forcing everyone to play by your rules (read: pay your fee) to make compatible products, i.e. products which feature a plug or socket which fits.
These are, of course, excellent examples of typical abuse of the patent system, as you're not really putting forward any new ideas, just using a specific uninteresting arrangement of pins and sheath to ensure you collect licensing royalties.
Because, while I'm sure Apple fanboys will claim it to be the perfect power connector, it has its disadvantages too. Start with the above search. Then there are people complaining that it comes out too easily; others complaining that they've knocked the cable and it's pulled the laptop to the floor with it (false sense of security!).
I've only ever knocked a portable computer to the floor once. It was Psion Series 3a, in a biology lab, and it wasn't connected to anything. Still works fine decades later. I appreciate that some people are more lackadaisical or clumsy with their hardware, but for those who aren't, a MagSafe connector's disadvantages may outweigh the advantages.
Mainstream SSL certificate issuers are hard enough to trust; ones too tight to even check the requester's identity properly doubly so.
Not sure whether to blame the issuers for not really caring as long as they get their overpayment, browser manufacturers for their root acceptance policy, or customers for not caring as long as the little lock icon is there.
Put another way, his group aimed at government and military targets. I assume you allow freedom fighters to do this.
Did he stop becoming a freedom fighter each time his group also chose what might be labeled a civilian target?
How long after that targeting those civilians did his whole mission revert to fighting for freedom?
While we're here, how long after the bombing of Dresden did the Allies in WW2 start becoming freedom fighters again?
I have this image of a civilian target capacitor which is charged up each time you target a civilian - perhaps the applied voltage increases if you happen to hit a baby or a woman, but I'm not sure. But I guess that until it discharges below some trigger level, you're not considered to be a freedom fighter. I also assume that the discharge resistor's resistance is decreased if you have particularly effective PR to argue that civilian hits were actually collateral damage, or that the civilians contribute to the regime's infrastructure.
Yes, the fledgling intelligence community, fledgling in the 40s and 50s, because it's not as if the likes of MI5 had been around since 1909 or anything.
The interwar intelligence community was nothing like post-WW2, and MI5 was not in a fit state for much in 1939. But you probably wanted to argue that GCHQ was just a renamed GCCS, which would be news to everyone.
By that logic
Read the bit in brackets. Just because something's judged right/wrong by you it doesn't mean it will be judged right/wrong by someone operating from a different set of principles. For GCHQ, Turing was wrong - not because he was gay but because he was not politically malleable. You can't study history by dismissing contemporary motivations and substituting your own.
it's unfortunate that being good at what you do isn't nearly enough
Being good at what you do should be irrelevant - it's just more obvious when a celebrity is mistreated. If only the mentally/physically mighty get treated well, then, you know...
Cockney rhyming slang for a bath. The man was a large iron/enamel basin. And basins give a ringing sound when you strike them. Two strikes, turings. Whence the Turing machine.
The man was an intelligence analyst in the fledgling intelligence community, and succeeding there means being political as much as technical. Unfortunately, he was not political. It was therefore right (in the sense of the community he was working in/for) to get rid of him. Remember Martin and Mitchell, America? damn traitorous... homosexuals!
English public schools are and always have been full of faggotry. If you didn't shout from the rooftops about it, no-one cared or cares. But "faggot!" has, until 30 years ago, been an excellent excuse to get rid of someone you don't like - just as "terrorist!" is used today. (Remember, the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is that the former is on your side.)
Google today are Microsoft tomorrow. If you have some good ideas, get to work on them yourself. It's more challenging but your work won't be subsumed by a corporate vision which in Google's case comes down to making a lot of money for shareholders by selling targeted ad space. And remember that the pursuit of happiness involves a journey, not a destination.
There's street cred but no great progress being a grunt in the cool gang. You're passionate: let it carry you.
You being a libertarian, have this crazy idea that people in less developed countries should be to engage in frictionless global commerce, right now
Once again, it's all about caveat emptor with you isn't it? Let me slow things down a bit in case you don't understand: no market works without the involvement of reputation.
To take one extreme, very few Nigerian businesses will offer international credit card processing facilities because the financial world does not trust Nigeria. It's not because there's some sort of racist developing-world-hate keeping the black man down, or whatever canard you want to wave - it's because Nigeria has a history of financial scamming backed by a regulatory and social environment which does very little to prevent that scamming.
Meanwhile, America's regarded as fairly financially safe. People's behaviour is comparatively traceable and regulated, the government never reneging on its own debts nor making it easy for others to do so.
Then you get places in between, like Poland. Well, OK, today they're much closer to America than Nigeria, but they still have a few years to go before they have demonstrated the responsibility required to give financial institutions (which, after all, represent their clients) the confidence to make currency trade with Poland as easy as with the US. This'll happen in Poland's case by entry into the eurozone.
Yes, this is group punishment: not every Nigerian is a scammer and not every Polish trader is slightly less financially reliable than every American. But humans cannot afford to judge every single stranger individually. You have to make group statistical judgements. Not understanding this is yet another Internet libertarian mistake, of course.
tl;dr Lots of people are scammed by stranger Nigerians asking for Western Union payments. bitcoin isn't going to make this any better. The solution is more accountability, not less. As for friends in Nigeria, there are already methods for making bank or cash transfers: a brief search on the Internet immediately shows banks quoting effective transaction costs below 4%. Or for the 0% of bitcoin, if I'm dealing in large amounts, I can receive a built-in guarantee that scammers in Nigeria will do their utmost to intercept the transmission and/or simply steal the PC of the recipient. Welcome to the real world, where the last thing developing countries need is the modern equivalent of being encouraged to stuff their cash under the mattress.
Yes, you are quite right. Paypal does most things wrong, but one thing it does right is not give the keys to the kingdom to every seller. Unless some unified scheme requiring a second authentication method is sufficiently widespread, it's unlikely that banks will be willing to set a flag on your card to reject any transactions not using it. Even then, any such good method requiring a second physical device ('phone/OTP/card reader) would be regarded as inconvenient and possibly discouraging the consumer from making another impulse purchase.
It's misleading for the interviewee to suggest that you have to trust merchants, though - of all the things they can hold and accidentally release about you (name, address, date of birth, telephone number, purchase habits, security answers, etc.), the credit card number is one thing you can change with no long term damage to yourself, providing you're alert.
Sorry, I forgot to answer your bracketed request. He makes clear:
"One contribution of mine to the community was a site where developers could get funded for developing features [for Bitcoin] and I'd love nothing more than to pay people to write free software."
The whole interview demonstrates the interviewee to be engaged in hand-waving, doublespeak, sidestepping, emotive language and outright untruth[tm]. I've tried to address the detail in other posts - this bit is just my hinting that the only time he's given a straight answer ("32") is the time he's been asked a question which is almost impossible to prove wrong.
And even then it's mixed in with a vague "because I gave the rest away to... some developers", phrased with just enough information to sound sacrificial while not denying the possibility of self-interest.
If SHA256 or ECDSA was ever cracked, we'd have far bigger problems to worry about than bitcoin being destroyed
Yeah, the world was in chaos and turmoil with no currency system or economy whatever before SHA256 or ECDSA.
The internet wasn't built perfect. But years of reshaping/patching/incremental design have shaped it into a workable network. Bitcoin will too undergo this transformation with time as it ages.
You insult the people who built the Interent by comparing your little project with it. The Internet wasn't built to make a few people with awful PR skills rich. It was a resilient defence network, then an academic network, then a general communications tool. It is a network of autonomous networks, parts being built independently to make a useful whole. Bitcoin is a single, poorly-thought-out idea with one fairly routine mathematical feature.
Bitcoin's protocol itself will need to be extended in order for it to grow.
By me, right? This is a democratic thing, so I get to vote for the representatives who decide on monetary issues, just like with regular government, yes?
The point to Bitcoin is that you can choose your own level of trust in an external service.
That is the "point to" every social endeavour, including exchange of plain-ol' dollar bills.
Then we can go further to where a person has all their funds in a trusted service like with email today-
We could call it a "bank".
Bitcoin- calling it a scheme for drug trafficking networks.
So you're saying it's not for that? It shouldn't be for that? What objection do you have to that statement?
The accepted 'standard' is to use SI prefixes.
The accepted standard when dealing with currency you're trying to sell to the wider population is not to say things like "the accepted standard is to use SI prefixes". This is the real world, not the science lab.
Our organisation has been aggressively seeking FSA regulation here in the UK for Britcoin.
If the FSA even thinks about granting some sort of approval for bitcoin then I'll be giving up on this country entirely. The disease of caveat emptor libertarianism has already deregulated the financial industry to the point that the country's public and private financial affairs are neck-deep in the shit - if the same disease manages to weave its own currency into the system then sensible investors and workers ought to pack up and leave before the country collapses into depression.
The illicit markets are a very small part of Bitcoin
Prove it. Show me the records that bitcoin is supposed not to have.
Sending funds abroad is time consuming, expensive and difficult. Recently I tried sending funds to a Polish bank from the UK- the bank was closed and I waited until Monday. Requiring me to be in person at the bank, the woman was unable to enter the Polish L looking character into her terminal. I had to aquire an internet banking code to do it online. Waited 3 days, logged in and the internet banking form didn't work. In the end, I ended using a friend to aquire Bitcoins and use the Polish exchange bitomat (we never use Britcoin ourself).
Because of the number of Polish people in the UK there are a billion and one reasonably priced ways of sending money quickly to Poland. If you don't know any of them and don't know how to use the Internet to find any of them then I seriously question your competence. When Poland enters the eurozone it'll be even SWIFTer, and certainly free for individuals. You know, there's a reason why it's harder to send money to certain countries, and as countries develop and their financial systems become more secure, it becomes easier to send money to those places. Since you're clearly libertarian you won't be able
It's a conspiracy theory to suggest that a businessman might just be promoting his product/service/idea to make more money? Apple must love you...
He said that he had 6000, but each time the value increased by some amount he invested them in his idea. And today he says he has 32. What I certainly believe, then, is that he's a businessman who has put a lot of "money" into his idea and he wants to make an RoI.
But the "answer" is something I'll never know. He's obviously a shyster who can't even form a good argument, and I'd believe 32 as easily as I believe 1 or 6000. I also assume his exhange is operated by him out of his own pocket, so he never gets any more bitcoins.
Slashdot Mirror
It can be done, but it's much easier when someone is falling in slow motion
Or just moving around with the cord round your leg.
Dropping a PDA on the floor is hardly comparable to a Dell Inspiron taking a dive.
Why is a 20 year old PDA still more sturdy than today's average laptop? What are manufacturers doing wrong?
A 20 second search reveals, for example, patents 5873737 and 6267602 issued before 2000. "Magnets to help electrically connect stuff" won't be specific enough for a patent, though... as with USB, the trick is in designing a specific plug and then forcing everyone to play by your rules (read: pay your fee) to make compatible products, i.e. products which feature a plug or socket which fits.
These are, of course, excellent examples of typical abuse of the patent system, as you're not really putting forward any new ideas, just using a specific uninteresting arrangement of pins and sheath to ensure you collect licensing royalties.
Because, while I'm sure Apple fanboys will claim it to be the perfect power connector, it has its disadvantages too. Start with the above search. Then there are people complaining that it comes out too easily; others complaining that they've knocked the cable and it's pulled the laptop to the floor with it (false sense of security!).
I've only ever knocked a portable computer to the floor once. It was Psion Series 3a, in a biology lab, and it wasn't connected to anything. Still works fine decades later. I appreciate that some people are more lackadaisical or clumsy with their hardware, but for those who aren't, a MagSafe connector's disadvantages may outweigh the advantages.
Mainstream SSL certificate issuers are hard enough to trust; ones too tight to even check the requester's identity properly doubly so.
Not sure whether to blame the issuers for not really caring as long as they get their overpayment, browser manufacturers for their root acceptance policy, or customers for not caring as long as the little lock icon is there.
+magsafe +connector +burn
And implementations have existed way before Apple, as with all ideas which end up being ascribed to Apple.
OK. Was he also a freedom fighter?
Put another way, his group aimed at government and military targets. I assume you allow freedom fighters to do this.
Did he stop becoming a freedom fighter each time his group also chose what might be labeled a civilian target?
How long after that targeting those civilians did his whole mission revert to fighting for freedom?
While we're here, how long after the bombing of Dresden did the Allies in WW2 start becoming freedom fighters again?
I have this image of a civilian target capacitor which is charged up each time you target a civilian - perhaps the applied voltage increases if you happen to hit a baby or a woman, but I'm not sure. But I guess that until it discharges below some trigger level, you're not considered to be a freedom fighter. I also assume that the discharge resistor's resistance is decreased if you have particularly effective PR to argue that civilian hits were actually collateral damage, or that the civilians contribute to the regime's infrastructure.
I further imagine that all these public relations parameters are tweaked in the war room. After all, it's certainly not the place for fighting.
Sigh, internet.
Or drive him to suicide and eliminate a liability. It certainly worked with David Kelly only a few years ago.
It's not like they're thinking, "Shit, in 40 years' time people will be cool with gays and we might be looked upon badly."
Yes, the fledgling intelligence community, fledgling in the 40s and 50s, because it's not as if the likes of MI5 had been around since 1909 or anything.
The interwar intelligence community was nothing like post-WW2, and MI5 was not in a fit state for much in 1939. But you probably wanted to argue that GCHQ was just a renamed GCCS, which would be news to everyone.
By that logic
Read the bit in brackets. Just because something's judged right/wrong by you it doesn't mean it will be judged right/wrong by someone operating from a different set of principles. For GCHQ, Turing was wrong - not because he was gay but because he was not politically malleable. You can't study history by dismissing contemporary motivations and substituting your own.
it's unfortunate that being good at what you do isn't nearly enough
Being good at what you do should be irrelevant - it's just more obvious when a celebrity is mistreated. If only the mentally/physically mighty get treated well, then, you know...
Freedom Fighters do not target civilian populations.
What was Mandela when leading Umkhonto we Sizwe?
Yup. My old school rules even included the tongue-in-cheek, "There is no tradition of fagging." And it almost has nothing to do with homosexuality ;-).
However.
Cockney rhyming slang for a bath. The man was a large iron/enamel basin. And basins give a ringing sound when you strike them. Two strikes, turings. Whence the Turing machine.
The man was an intelligence analyst in the fledgling intelligence community, and succeeding there means being political as much as technical. Unfortunately, he was not political. It was therefore right (in the sense of the community he was working in/for) to get rid of him. Remember Martin and Mitchell, America? damn traitorous... homosexuals!
English public schools are and always have been full of faggotry. If you didn't shout from the rooftops about it, no-one cared or cares. But "faggot!" has, until 30 years ago, been an excellent excuse to get rid of someone you don't like - just as "terrorist!" is used today. (Remember, the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is that the former is on your side.)
Google today are Microsoft tomorrow. If you have some good ideas, get to work on them yourself. It's more challenging but your work won't be subsumed by a corporate vision which in Google's case comes down to making a lot of money for shareholders by selling targeted ad space. And remember that the pursuit of happiness involves a journey, not a destination.
There's street cred but no great progress being a grunt in the cool gang. You're passionate: let it carry you.
always
Use of that word is (almost) always inappropriate.
I don't have a problem with your mother being my sex slave.
Fortunately, rights aren't about one person's preference getting to determine everyone's way of life.
Mostly.
You being a libertarian, have this crazy idea that people in less developed countries should be to engage in frictionless global commerce, right now
Once again, it's all about caveat emptor with you isn't it? Let me slow things down a bit in case you don't understand: no market works without the involvement of reputation.
To take one extreme, very few Nigerian businesses will offer international credit card processing facilities because the financial world does not trust Nigeria. It's not because there's some sort of racist developing-world-hate keeping the black man down, or whatever canard you want to wave - it's because Nigeria has a history of financial scamming backed by a regulatory and social environment which does very little to prevent that scamming.
Meanwhile, America's regarded as fairly financially safe. People's behaviour is comparatively traceable and regulated, the government never reneging on its own debts nor making it easy for others to do so.
Then you get places in between, like Poland. Well, OK, today they're much closer to America than Nigeria, but they still have a few years to go before they have demonstrated the responsibility required to give financial institutions (which, after all, represent their clients) the confidence to make currency trade with Poland as easy as with the US. This'll happen in Poland's case by entry into the eurozone.
Yes, this is group punishment: not every Nigerian is a scammer and not every Polish trader is slightly less financially reliable than every American. But humans cannot afford to judge every single stranger individually. You have to make group statistical judgements. Not understanding this is yet another Internet libertarian mistake, of course.
tl;dr Lots of people are scammed by stranger Nigerians asking for Western Union payments. bitcoin isn't going to make this any better. The solution is more accountability, not less. As for friends in Nigeria, there are already methods for making bank or cash transfers: a brief search on the Internet immediately shows banks quoting effective transaction costs below 4%. Or for the 0% of bitcoin, if I'm dealing in large amounts, I can receive a built-in guarantee that scammers in Nigeria will do their utmost to intercept the transmission and/or simply steal the PC of the recipient. Welcome to the real world, where the last thing developing countries need is the modern equivalent of being encouraged to stuff their cash under the mattress.
Yes, you are quite right. Paypal does most things wrong, but one thing it does right is not give the keys to the kingdom to every seller. Unless some unified scheme requiring a second authentication method is sufficiently widespread, it's unlikely that banks will be willing to set a flag on your card to reject any transactions not using it. Even then, any such good method requiring a second physical device ('phone/OTP/card reader) would be regarded as inconvenient and possibly discouraging the consumer from making another impulse purchase.
It's misleading for the interviewee to suggest that you have to trust merchants, though - of all the things they can hold and accidentally release about you (name, address, date of birth, telephone number, purchase habits, security answers, etc.), the credit card number is one thing you can change with no long term damage to yourself, providing you're alert.
If a regulatory standard does not have a publicly accessible database to confirm conformance, it is useless.
This includes the worst such standard of all: the self-certified. See also Ethernet over powerline, RFI and Ofcom.
Sorry, I forgot to answer your bracketed request. He makes clear:
"One contribution of mine to the community was a site where developers could get funded for developing features [for Bitcoin] and I'd love nothing more than to pay people to write free software."
The whole interview demonstrates the interviewee to be engaged in hand-waving, doublespeak, sidestepping, emotive language and outright untruth[tm]. I've tried to address the detail in other posts - this bit is just my hinting that the only time he's given a straight answer ("32") is the time he's been asked a question which is almost impossible to prove wrong.
And even then it's mixed in with a vague "because I gave the rest away to... some developers", phrased with just enough information to sound sacrificial while not denying the possibility of self-interest.
If SHA256 or ECDSA was ever cracked, we'd have far bigger problems to worry about than bitcoin being destroyed
Yeah, the world was in chaos and turmoil with no currency system or economy whatever before SHA256 or ECDSA.
The internet wasn't built perfect. But years of reshaping/patching/incremental design have shaped it into a workable network. Bitcoin will too undergo this transformation with time as it ages.
You insult the people who built the Interent by comparing your little project with it. The Internet wasn't built to make a few people with awful PR skills rich. It was a resilient defence network, then an academic network, then a general communications tool. It is a network of autonomous networks, parts being built independently to make a useful whole. Bitcoin is a single, poorly-thought-out idea with one fairly routine mathematical feature.
Bitcoin's protocol itself will need to be extended in order for it to grow.
By me, right? This is a democratic thing, so I get to vote for the representatives who decide on monetary issues, just like with regular government, yes?
The point to Bitcoin is that you can choose your own level of trust in an external service.
That is the "point to" every social endeavour, including exchange of plain-ol' dollar bills.
Then we can go further to where a person has all their funds in a trusted service like with email today-
We could call it a "bank".
Bitcoin- calling it a scheme for drug trafficking networks.
So you're saying it's not for that? It shouldn't be for that? What objection do you have to that statement?
The accepted 'standard' is to use SI prefixes.
The accepted standard when dealing with currency you're trying to sell to the wider population is not to say things like "the accepted standard is to use SI prefixes". This is the real world, not the science lab.
Our organisation has been aggressively seeking FSA regulation here in the UK for Britcoin.
If the FSA even thinks about granting some sort of approval for bitcoin then I'll be giving up on this country entirely. The disease of caveat emptor libertarianism has already deregulated the financial industry to the point that the country's public and private financial affairs are neck-deep in the shit - if the same disease manages to weave its own currency into the system then sensible investors and workers ought to pack up and leave before the country collapses into depression.
The illicit markets are a very small part of Bitcoin
Prove it. Show me the records that bitcoin is supposed not to have.
Sending funds abroad is time consuming, expensive and difficult. Recently I tried sending funds to a Polish bank from the UK- the bank was closed and I waited until Monday. Requiring me to be in person at the bank, the woman was unable to enter the Polish L looking character into her terminal. I had to aquire an internet banking code to do it online. Waited 3 days, logged in and the internet banking form didn't work. In the end, I ended using a friend to aquire Bitcoins and use the Polish exchange bitomat (we never use Britcoin ourself).
Because of the number of Polish people in the UK there are a billion and one reasonably priced ways of sending money quickly to Poland. If you don't know any of them and don't know how to use the Internet to find any of them then I seriously question your competence. When Poland enters the eurozone it'll be even SWIFTer, and certainly free for individuals. You know, there's a reason why it's harder to send money to certain countries, and as countries develop and their financial systems become more secure, it becomes easier to send money to those places. Since you're clearly libertarian you won't be able
It's a conspiracy theory to suggest that a businessman might just be promoting his product/service/idea to make more money? Apple must love you...
He said that he had 6000, but each time the value increased by some amount he invested them in his idea. And today he says he has 32. What I certainly believe, then, is that he's a businessman who has put a lot of "money" into his idea and he wants to make an RoI.
But the "answer" is something I'll never know. He's obviously a shyster who can't even form a good argument, and I'd believe 32 as easily as I believe 1 or 6000. I also assume his exhange is operated by him out of his own pocket, so he never gets any more bitcoins.