I have an Mt.Gox account but have never actually used it for anything. I received the following e-mail earlier today.
Dear Mt.Gox user,
Our database has been compromised, including your email. We are working on a quick resolution and to begin with, your password has been disabled as a security measure (and you will need to reset it to login again on Mt.Gox).
If you were using the same password on Mt.Gox and other places (email, etc), you should change this password as soon as possible.
The informations there will be updated as our investigation progresses.
Please accept our apologies for the troubles caused, and be certain we will do everything we can to keep the funds entrusted with us as secure as possible.
While the password is encrypted, it is possible to bruteforce most passwords with time, and it is likely bad people are working on this right now.
Any unauthorized access done to any account you own (email, mtgox, etc) should be reported to the appropriate authorities in your country.
Thanks, The Mt.Gox team
Gmail also flagged suspicious failed login attempts on my e-mail account, so I had to go through a password reset process on it. Although I used a unique password at Mt.Gox, the attacker apparently is running automated login attempts using the stolen e-mail addresses and Mt.Gox passwords, so anyone using non-unique passwords is likely in trouble.
If you're not paying me to type a certain way, either FUCK OFF or do a search/replace (or both). I owe you nothing. If you are paying me, and putting only a single space is a job requirement (this has never happened), then I'll do a search/replace when I'm done typing. Then I'll look for a better job. If HTML doesn't render the spaces -- fuck it, not my problem. If you enjoy typing a single space -- I don't give a fuck what you do just like you shouldn't give a fuck what I do.
Please see this -- this is a well-known puzzle over 50 years old, and I'm surprised that there are people on Slashdot who weren't familiar with it already.
I'm not sure why I'm wasting time responding to a troll but whatever.
> The question is 1 coin is heads, what is the probability that the other coin is heads. In other words, your girlfriend is pregnant. What are the odds that my girlfriend is also pregnant?
No, you read it wrong. What it's actually asking is (if we pretend all girlfriends have exactly a 50% chance of being pregnant): "two girlfriends exist. At least one of the two is pregnant. What are the odds that both girlfriends are pregnant?"
You just read it wrong and you're too stubborn too admit that you could ever be wrong, even though this puzzle is FIFTY YEARS OLD and is well documented all over the internet. Just see the Wikipedia article on it.
Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you -- this is actually a well-documented mathematical puzzle, and there's even a Wikipedia article on it.
Similar to the Monty Hall Problem, almost everybody assumes 50% at first, since it seems natural and intuitive. When the question is stated unambiguously (the version at the top of this thread was admittedly not very clear), the answer really is 33%, provable both by basic math and by actual testing. The purpose of the problem is to see if someone can admit that he's wrong when he's confronted with logical and empirical evidence. This is often used during job interviews. Needless to say, you wouldn't be getting the job.
Then we receive some new information: at least one of the coins is Heads. That rules out the last option. Let's recalculate the odds based on the new information:
Now, let's look at the question (reworded slightly to hopefully make it less confusing for you): "Two coins are flipped. At least one of the two coins lands Heads. What are the odds that both coins landed Heads?"
In the first instance (33.3%), both coins landed heads. In the second and third instances (combined 66.7%), both coins did not land heads.
So the answer is 1/3 (33.333...%)
You can verify this with some actual coins. Flip two coins, then if either coin is heads, check to see if the other coin is heads. Keep a tally of how often the other coin is or isn't heads. If you haven't actually flipped coins, you're just talking out your buttocks.
I don't know how else to help you if you're still struggling.
What gives you the right to tell people what they can and can't look at in a public place? Why should people have to control themselves when they're doing nothing wrong?
You do not have the right to exert control or force over the life of another person. By telling someone that they can't look at something, with an implicit threat of force (imprisonment), you are exerting control over that person's life.
Are you going to make it a crime for your eyes to accidentally intersect with someone who doesn't want to be looked at? What about people who don't want their hands looked at, but go out in public without making any effort to conceal them? Should you throw people in jail for looking at those people's hands, even if they have no way of knowing that the person doesn't want his/her hands looked at?
If they voluntarily wear clothing that, when viewed from certain angles, reveals things that they don't want others to see, then they made a poor choice of clothing. If, for some reason they care so damn much about concealing themselves, then they're wearing the wrong clothing. If, however, they don't care, then they should continue to wear clothing that's open to the public.
Personally, I don't think they should care. What are they so sensitive about? Most women who are secure with their sexuality don't care if bystanders catch a fleeting glimpse up their skirt. The age of puritanism is over, folks.
Of course it's not legal to lift up a girl's skirt without her consent (nobody actually made the statement you seem to have a problem with), because that involves touching her or her clothing, which you would need permission to do. However, you don't need permission to look at someone. If she's wearing a skirt and walking on a glass floor in a public place, why should it be illegal for you, standing below, to simply look up?
It's an evil society that makes looking a crime. That's one step away from 1984.
You have no to tell people in a public place that they can't look at certain things.
Rape involves touching someone, which is a violation of their freedom if done against their will. But in a public place, you have the right to look at anything that's being displayed for public viewing.
If a person is walking around naked (voluntarily) in a public palce, you have the right to look at them. If they didn't want someone looking at them naked, why did they go out in a public place?
Similarly, if you wear a skirt, and thus display your panties to the world (from the right angle, anyway), what right do you have to tell people that they can't look at you from a certain angle? None.
That's Final Fantasy 4. The atrociously bad first English translation of it (the American SNES version) was released under the title "Final Fantasy 2" in the U.S. to avoid confusing "stupid American consumers", because the real Final Fantasy 2 and 3 hadn't been released in English. In addition to being released under the wrong name, the difficulty level was reduced considerably from the real version, the translation was a horrid mess, and the dialog was heavily censored ("spoony bard", anyone?) to make the game "kid friendly".
The re-release of Final Fantasy 4 in English (for the Playstation) restored the correct title and gave us the real version of the game and a reasonably good translation.
Yeah, I remember when they first turned the thing on and it started emitting the distress signal. Didn't a government helicopter land right in the middle of the football field trying to figure out what was going on?
Anyway, you can still see a good portion of the screen from the interstate if you're in the right spot, enough to get a good idea of what's happening on the screen (even from five miles away). If you were at a higher elevation, you could probably get a full view; I've spotted some roads winding up some of the taller mountains that would probably fit the bill.
if there was only an easy way to turn off that damn tabbed browsing feature in Firefox.
There is. I'm not sure why you'd want to use it (I personally can't live without tabs, and even those who don't like them could just avoid opening any), but TabKiller is there for anyone who wants it.
to make it impossible for someone to run a program that just rotates through one roll of paper and fills up a box with Bush's name on it,
Why do you think it's bad for someone to do this for Bush but completely okay for someone to commit fraud for your candidate? Election fraud overwhelmingly favors Democrats. It's been estimated that 20% of all votes for Democratic candidates in national elections are fraudelent (i.e. dead people voting, pets voting, multiple registrations for one person, etc); I'd say it's not the Republicans we need to be worried about.
Most of the major web servers today (including Apache and IIS) support virtual hosts (or vhosts), and the majority of smaller websites today share a web server with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of other sites through the use of virtual hosting. This is especially true for static-only websites (no CGI, database access, etc) that don't require much in the way of system resources. All they need are disk space and bandwidth.
Say that domain1.com and domain2.com are hosted on the same web server, with the same IP address. You type http://domain1.com/index.html in your web browser. The web browser looks up the IP address (the same IP it would've gotten if it'd looked up domain2, but that doesn't matter), wraps up your HTTP request inside a TCP/IP header, and sends it off. When the web server gets the packet, it discards the TCP/IP header and looks at the HTTP request, which tells it what file you want: http://domain1.com/index.html. Now it knows what domain you're trying to access, so it checks its virtual host configration to see where the files of domain1.com are located on disc, and it grabs the index.html from that directory and sends it back to you. If you request a document from a domain that isn't defined, or if you request a document from the IP address itself rather than from a domain name, or if you're using a very old web browser that just asks for/index.html rather than domain1.com/index.html, you'll get the default site rather than one of the vhosted sites.
This is easy to demonstrate with an example: look up the IPs of timecube.com and abovegod.com. Same IP, but differentsites. They're both hosted on the same server, and the IP address of both is 207.150.192.12. But if you try to visit 207.150.192.12 with your web browser, you'll get the web server's default page -- in this case, an error message.
Child pornography (summarized definition): sexually explicit visual depictions of minors.
Sexually explicit (full definition): actual or simulated sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.
If it's not on the above list, it's not sexually explicit, and thus it's not child pornography.
The ISP routing the packet only knows what IP address it's going to and what port's it's going to. The TCP/IP header that routing decisions are based on does not tell anything about what's to be done with the packet once it reaches the destination IP. The information about what website the request is bound for is contained inside the HTTP request, not in the TCP/IP header. That information is part of the payload of the packet, not part of the header. You can't make route/drop decisions based on the payload of a packet without using special high-end routers with special capabilities to look inside the payloads of the packets they route and make decisions based on the contents. That would be slow, expensive, and illegal for a consumer ISP to do without the customer's express consent.
You're an ISP. A packet comes in from a customer bound for an IP address that's listed on the blacklist as hosting a child pornography site. However, it hosts 1000 other sites as well. Your routers only look at the packet header. How do you determine what site it's bound for? Remember: you do not have the legal authority or the equipment or the time to look into the packet's payload, only the TCP/IP header. With these restrictions in place, tell me how you'd do this. If you think it's possible, it's time to put up or shut up.
The article doesn't go into a lot of technical details, but if you read it and you're not stupid, you should be able to figure it out. Do you even know what virtual hosts are? A web hosting company will put hundreds or even thousands of their customers on a single web server, sharing a single IP address.
Under this law, if one of those thousands of web sites is identified as illegal (without a trial or due process, mind you) by the government, then all the other thousands of sites that share the web server get blocked as well. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals, small businesses, non-profit organizations, charities, community groups, clubs, etc., who suddenly learn that nobody in the state (including themselves) can visit their web site anymore because of the actions of a single other customer of their web hosting company.
Do you really think that's fair?
The ISPs can only filter by IP address and destination port, not by the site at that IP that a web request is actually destined for, because their routers only look at the TCP/IP header, not inside the HTTP request. Looking inside the HTTP request could potentially allow the ISP to block sites on a domain-name basis rather than an IP basis, but it's illegal under current privacy laws (without the customer's consent), it would require additional very expensive equipment that would put most ISPs out of business, and it would slow down web access considerably every everybody
I followed the link in your signature and read the entire story. Frankly, I'm a bit disturbed by what it's implying.
It is an interesting story, and it does do a good job of explaining many facets of economics (anyone who understands that inflation is an intrinsic part of our economic model will recognize that much of the story is based on real concepts), but I can't help but wonder how you managed to overlook the not-so-suble anti-Semitic overtones.
The "secret cartel of bankers running the world and controlling the media" theory is exactly what you see on the typical anti-Semitic website, and the fact that the article conceals its racism by not specifically mentioning Jews does not absolve it of responsibility. "Fabian" is portrayed exactly like a sterotypical "secret cartel" Jew that right-wing paranoids will endlessly ramble on about, and the other bankers are portrayed the same way. The artwork supports the racism of the article. Look at this picture (if the link doesn't work, search the page for the phrase "Goldsmiths from other towns") of the group that allegedly controls the economy, the government, the media, and the world. Do you think the giant noses and obvious Jewish caricatures were an accident? That's exactly the same artwork style that's been used in racistcartoons (WARNING: offensive links) for years.
Let's look a bit further at the story:
The "bankers" (i.e. Jews) are accussed of controlling the government from behind the scenes.
The "bankers" are accused of manipulating the economy through moneylending in order to avoid ever having to work. (This is the most persistent anti-Semitic stereotypes.)
The "bankers" are quoted as saying to each other, "It is our right and duty to rule. The masses don't know what is good for them. They need to be rallied and organised. To rule is our birthright." This is straight out of any piece of Nazi propoganda that you care to pick up.
An angry Jewish-looking man is portrayed sitting at a desk inscribed with dollar signs and "eye in the pyramid" symbols (another favorite of conspiracy loonies).
The Federal Reserve system is portrayed as being a front for "private lenders", which is in turn portrayed as being a front for an obscured building with a quesiton mark on it that looks a lot like a Jewish temple.
The story then descends into standard Christian fundamentalist "New World Order" paranoia, implying at the end of it all that our Jewish-banker protagonist is actually the Anti-Christ himself... a favorite theory of the racist Christian Identity movement. At the end of the story, he's seized complete control of the world (through the standard method of tattooing "666" on everyone's hand) all because we didn't listen to the rantings and ravings of the violent racists who tried to "warn" us of the "great Zionist conspiracy."
Okay, so the story starts with sound economic truths and then starts to blend in racism and hatred through misleading assumptions, half-truths, and outright lies. This is hardly out of the ordinary for hate groups that want to be racist without admitting to being racist. I'll admit, the story isn't as
if we someday have the scientific knowledge to trace every cause and effect from your genes through all your experiences to some action you produce, should you really be held responsible for those actions any more than a hurricaine should be held responsible for its distruction?
There are only two possibilities: If one person has free will, everyone has free will. If one person has no free will, nobody has free will.
If you claim that a criminal has no control over his actions because he has no free will, then the rest of us have no control over our actions either, and we have no choice as to whether or not to hold him responsible. If we do hold him responsible for his actions, it's because we had no choice.
You can't have it both ways: if the criminal has no free will, then neither do the people who punish him for it. Just as he couldn't have chosen not to be a criminal, they couldn't have chosen not to punish him for it.
With developers like this, who needs enemies? I honestly don't expect them to get very far as long as they have employees that display that special combination of arrogance and absolute stupidity that's giving all Linux users a bad name. As long as bugs like that are intentionally left unfixed, I will never use Red Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
Protocol specification: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification
1 Bitcoin can be subdivided into 100,000,000 Satoshis, the smallest possible unit under the current specification.
http://mpex.co/
https://campbx.com/faq.php#trading
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Futures
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Forex
https://icbit.se/
https://www.firstnationalib.com/
I have an Mt.Gox account but have never actually used it for anything. I received the following e-mail earlier today.
Gmail also flagged suspicious failed login attempts on my e-mail account, so I had to go through a password reset process on it. Although I used a unique password at Mt.Gox, the attacker apparently is running automated login attempts using the stolen e-mail addresses and Mt.Gox passwords, so anyone using non-unique passwords is likely in trouble.
If you're not paying me to type a certain way, either FUCK OFF or do a search/replace (or both). I owe you nothing. If you are paying me, and putting only a single space is a job requirement (this has never happened), then I'll do a search/replace when I'm done typing. Then I'll look for a better job. If HTML doesn't render the spaces -- fuck it, not my problem. If you enjoy typing a single space -- I don't give a fuck what you do just like you shouldn't give a fuck what I do.
Please see this -- this is a well-known puzzle over 50 years old, and I'm surprised that there are people on Slashdot who weren't familiar with it already.
I'm not sure why I'm wasting time responding to a troll but whatever.
> The question is 1 coin is heads, what is the probability that the other coin is heads. In other words, your girlfriend is pregnant. What are the odds that my girlfriend is also pregnant?
No, you read it wrong. What it's actually asking is (if we pretend all girlfriends have exactly a 50% chance of being pregnant): "two girlfriends exist. At least one of the two is pregnant. What are the odds that both girlfriends are pregnant?"
You just read it wrong and you're too stubborn too admit that you could ever be wrong, even though this puzzle is FIFTY YEARS OLD and is well documented all over the internet. Just see the Wikipedia article on it.
Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you -- this is actually a well-documented mathematical puzzle, and there's even a Wikipedia article on it.
Similar to the Monty Hall Problem, almost everybody assumes 50% at first, since it seems natural and intuitive. When the question is stated unambiguously (the version at the top of this thread was admittedly not very clear), the answer really is 33%, provable both by basic math and by actual testing. The purpose of the problem is to see if someone can admit that he's wrong when he's confronted with logical and empirical evidence. This is often used during job interviews. Needless to say, you wouldn't be getting the job.
See also Bertrand's Box Paradox or the Three Prisoners Problem for similar puzzles.
I think I can help clarify this for you since you seem to be the only one to still be having trouble understanding this.
Two coins are flipped. In the absence of any other information, there are four possibilities:
Heads, Heads: 25%
Heads, Tails: 25%
Tails, Heads: 25%
Tails, Tails: 25%
Then we receive some new information: at least one of the coins is Heads. That rules out the last option. Let's recalculate the odds based on the new information:
Heads, Heads: 33.3%
Heads, Tails: 33.3%
Tails, Heads: 33.3%
Now, let's look at the question (reworded slightly to hopefully make it less confusing for you): "Two coins are flipped. At least one of the two coins lands Heads. What are the odds that both coins landed Heads?"
In the first instance (33.3%), both coins landed heads. In the second and third instances (combined 66.7%), both coins did not land heads.
So the answer is 1/3 (33.333...%)
You can verify this with some actual coins. Flip two coins, then if either coin is heads, check to see if the other coin is heads. Keep a tally of how often the other coin is or isn't heads. If you haven't actually flipped coins, you're just talking out your buttocks.
I don't know how else to help you if you're still struggling.
If you find yourself in near-accidents this frequently, the bad driver is probably you.
What gives you the right to tell people what they can and can't look at in a public place? Why should people have to control themselves when they're doing nothing wrong?
You do not have the right to exert control or force over the life of another person. By telling someone that they can't look at something, with an implicit threat of force (imprisonment), you are exerting control over that person's life.
Are you going to make it a crime for your eyes to accidentally intersect with someone who doesn't want to be looked at? What about people who don't want their hands looked at, but go out in public without making any effort to conceal them? Should you throw people in jail for looking at those people's hands, even if they have no way of knowing that the person doesn't want his/her hands looked at?
It's sheer insanity.
If they voluntarily wear clothing that, when viewed from certain angles, reveals things that they don't want others to see, then they made a poor choice of clothing. If, for some reason they care so damn much about concealing themselves, then they're wearing the wrong clothing. If, however, they don't care, then they should continue to wear clothing that's open to the public.
Personally, I don't think they should care. What are they so sensitive about? Most women who are secure with their sexuality don't care if bystanders catch a fleeting glimpse up their skirt. The age of puritanism is over, folks.
Of course it's not legal to lift up a girl's skirt without her consent (nobody actually made the statement you seem to have a problem with), because that involves touching her or her clothing, which you would need permission to do. However, you don't need permission to look at someone. If she's wearing a skirt and walking on a glass floor in a public place, why should it be illegal for you, standing below, to simply look up?
It's an evil society that makes looking a crime. That's one step away from 1984.
You have no to tell people in a public place that they can't look at certain things.
Rape involves touching someone, which is a violation of their freedom if done against their will. But in a public place, you have the right to look at anything that's being displayed for public viewing.
If a person is walking around naked (voluntarily) in a public palce, you have the right to look at them. If they didn't want someone looking at them naked, why did they go out in a public place?
Similarly, if you wear a skirt, and thus display your panties to the world (from the right angle, anyway), what right do you have to tell people that they can't look at you from a certain angle? None.
Looking can not and should not be a crime.
That's Final Fantasy 4. The atrociously bad first English translation of it (the American SNES version) was released under the title "Final Fantasy 2" in the U.S. to avoid confusing "stupid American consumers", because the real Final Fantasy 2 and 3 hadn't been released in English. In addition to being released under the wrong name, the difficulty level was reduced considerably from the real version, the translation was a horrid mess, and the dialog was heavily censored ("spoony bard", anyone?) to make the game "kid friendly".
The re-release of Final Fantasy 4 in English (for the Playstation) restored the correct title and gave us the real version of the game and a reasonably good translation.
Yeah, I remember when they first turned the thing on and it started emitting the distress signal. Didn't a government helicopter land right in the middle of the football field trying to figure out what was going on?
Anyway, you can still see a good portion of the screen from the interstate if you're in the right spot, enough to get a good idea of what's happening on the screen (even from five miles away). If you were at a higher elevation, you could probably get a full view; I've spotted some roads winding up some of the taller mountains that would probably fit the bill.
The screen is 107-feet by 30-feet.
if there was only an easy way to turn off that damn tabbed browsing feature in Firefox.
There is. I'm not sure why you'd want to use it (I personally can't live without tabs, and even those who don't like them could just avoid opening any), but TabKiller is there for anyone who wants it.
to make it impossible for someone to run a program that just rotates through one roll of paper and fills up a box with Bush's name on it,
Why do you think it's bad for someone to do this for Bush but completely okay for someone to commit fraud for your candidate? Election fraud overwhelmingly favors Democrats. It's been estimated that 20% of all votes for Democratic candidates in national elections are fraudelent (i.e. dead people voting, pets voting, multiple registrations for one person, etc); I'd say it's not the Republicans we need to be worried about.
Most of the major web servers today (including Apache and IIS) support virtual hosts (or vhosts), and the majority of smaller websites today share a web server with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of other sites through the use of virtual hosting. This is especially true for static-only websites (no CGI, database access, etc) that don't require much in the way of system resources. All they need are disk space and bandwidth.
/index.html rather than domain1.com/index.html, you'll get the default site rather than one of the vhosted sites.
Say that domain1.com and domain2.com are hosted on the same web server, with the same IP address. You type http://domain1.com/index.html in your web browser. The web browser looks up the IP address (the same IP it would've gotten if it'd looked up domain2, but that doesn't matter), wraps up your HTTP request inside a TCP/IP header, and sends it off. When the web server gets the packet, it discards the TCP/IP header and looks at the HTTP request, which tells it what file you want: http://domain1.com/index.html. Now it knows what domain you're trying to access, so it checks its virtual host configration to see where the files of domain1.com are located on disc, and it grabs the index.html from that directory and sends it back to you. If you request a document from a domain that isn't defined, or if you request a document from the IP address itself rather than from a domain name, or if you're using a very old web browser that just asks for
This is easy to demonstrate with an example: look up the IPs of timecube.com and abovegod.com. Same IP, but different sites. They're both hosted on the same server, and the IP address of both is 207.150.192.12. But if you try to visit 207.150.192.12 with your web browser, you'll get the web server's default page -- in this case, an error message.
This is official US definition.
Child pornography (summarized definition): sexually explicit visual depictions of minors.
Sexually explicit (full definition): actual or simulated sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.
If it's not on the above list, it's not sexually explicit, and thus it's not child pornography.
The ISP routing the packet only knows what IP address it's going to and what port's it's going to. The TCP/IP header that routing decisions are based on does not tell anything about what's to be done with the packet once it reaches the destination IP. The information about what website the request is bound for is contained inside the HTTP request, not in the TCP/IP header. That information is part of the payload of the packet, not part of the header. You can't make route/drop decisions based on the payload of a packet without using special high-end routers with special capabilities to look inside the payloads of the packets they route and make decisions based on the contents. That would be slow, expensive, and illegal for a consumer ISP to do without the customer's express consent.
You're an ISP. A packet comes in from a customer bound for an IP address that's listed on the blacklist as hosting a child pornography site. However, it hosts 1000 other sites as well. Your routers only look at the packet header. How do you determine what site it's bound for? Remember: you do not have the legal authority or the equipment or the time to look into the packet's payload, only the TCP/IP header. With these restrictions in place, tell me how you'd do this. If you think it's possible, it's time to put up or shut up.
The article doesn't go into a lot of technical details, but if you read it and you're not stupid, you should be able to figure it out. Do you even know what virtual hosts are? A web hosting company will put hundreds or even thousands of their customers on a single web server, sharing a single IP address.
Under this law, if one of those thousands of web sites is identified as illegal (without a trial or due process, mind you) by the government, then all the other thousands of sites that share the web server get blocked as well. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals, small businesses, non-profit organizations, charities, community groups, clubs, etc., who suddenly learn that nobody in the state (including themselves) can visit their web site anymore because of the actions of a single other customer of their web hosting company.
Do you really think that's fair?
The ISPs can only filter by IP address and destination port, not by the site at that IP that a web request is actually destined for, because their routers only look at the TCP/IP header, not inside the HTTP request. Looking inside the HTTP request could potentially allow the ISP to block sites on a domain-name basis rather than an IP basis, but it's illegal under current privacy laws (without the customer's consent), it would require additional very expensive equipment that would put most ISPs out of business, and it would slow down web access considerably every everybody
I followed the link in your signature and read the entire story. Frankly, I'm a bit disturbed by what it's implying.
It is an interesting story, and it does do a good job of explaining many facets of economics (anyone who understands that inflation is an intrinsic part of our economic model will recognize that much of the story is based on real concepts), but I can't help but wonder how you managed to overlook the not-so-suble anti-Semitic overtones.
The "secret cartel of bankers running the world and controlling the media" theory is exactly what you see on the typical anti-Semitic website, and the fact that the article conceals its racism by not specifically mentioning Jews does not absolve it of responsibility. "Fabian" is portrayed exactly like a sterotypical "secret cartel" Jew that right-wing paranoids will endlessly ramble on about, and the other bankers are portrayed the same way. The artwork supports the racism of the article. Look at this picture (if the link doesn't work, search the page for the phrase "Goldsmiths from other towns") of the group that allegedly controls the economy, the government, the media, and the world. Do you think the giant noses and obvious Jewish caricatures were an accident? That's exactly the same artwork style that's been used in racist cartoons (WARNING: offensive links) for years.
Let's look a bit further at the story:
Okay, so the story starts with sound economic truths and then starts to blend in racism and hatred through misleading assumptions, half-truths, and outright lies. This is hardly out of the ordinary for hate groups that want to be racist without admitting to being racist. I'll admit, the story isn't as
if we someday have the scientific knowledge to trace every cause and effect from your genes through all your experiences to some action you produce, should you really be held responsible for those actions any more than a hurricaine should be held responsible for its distruction?
There are only two possibilities:
If one person has free will, everyone has free will.
If one person has no free will, nobody has free will.
If you claim that a criminal has no control over his actions because he has no free will, then the rest of us have no control over our actions either, and we have no choice as to whether or not to hold him responsible. If we do hold him responsible for his actions, it's because we had no choice.
You can't have it both ways: if the criminal has no free will, then neither do the people who punish him for it. Just as he couldn't have chosen not to be a criminal, they couldn't have chosen not to punish him for it.
With developers like this, who needs enemies? I honestly don't expect them to get very far as long as they have employees that display that special combination of arrogance and absolute stupidity that's giving all Linux users a bad name. As long as bugs like that are intentionally left unfixed, I will never use Red Hat.