Well, if the event was sponsored by Pepsi, yes. That's generally one of the conditions for sponsorship.
There's a big difference between putting up Pepsi logos and branding (which everyone involved said they were fine with) and forbidding anyone to use any drink that isn't a Pepsi product, including water and coffee. No one could reasonably have expected the latter going in.
Nor does corporate sponsorship imply that a "branding consultant" should engage in aggressively sexist behavior that would get someone fired if they did it in any normal white-collar office.
So we're politicizing browser selection now? This amounts to dragging end users into a political dispute that they have nothing to do with. Is this really a road we want to go down? How long before people start blocking IE because they don't like Microsoft's business tactics, or before Apple starts blocking Google Chrome users with a message complaining about alleged patent infringement?
Once this Pandora's box is open, it will be impossible to close. This time it may be aimed at Brendan Eich for the heinous crime of holding onto outdated views of gay marriage a whole two years longer than President Obama, but next time it could be anyone.
What society really needs to do is admit that some people are simply unfit to be in control of a vehicle and deny them a license.
Fail the test three times, that's it. No more chances.
The problem is that America's layout and infrastructure, outside of a few large cities, is configured around the assumption that everyone owns a car. In most parts of the country, if someone can't drive, they won't be able to get to work, do their shopping, or do anything else that is required as part of a normal adult life. Therefore, driving standards are low by necessity, because otherwise you're basically removing someone from normal society. Taking someone's license away is tantamount to putting them under house arrest.
This will eventually be fixed when self-driving cars become mainstream (probably 10-20 years). Most people will be using the auto-driving feature to get where they need to go, and we can then jack up the requirements for manual driving as high as we want without causing trouble.
Isn't it obvious? People who, in previous times, would simply have been considered oddballs are now being diagnosed as autistic. 30 years ago most Americans hadn't even heard of autism, now every parent in the country is on lookout for the warning signs and ready to get a diagnosis at the drop of a hat. I really don't think it's any more complicated than that.
X.org, not Wayland. Wayland is still under development. Wayland devs must be elated that Mir has made the debate "Wayland vs Mir" rather than "Tried, trusted, works, and feature complete X.org vs Wayland."
X.org is not "feature complete" in any meaningful sense. It is incapable of doing the kind of GPU-accelerated, alpha-blended compositing that is expected on a modern user interface. Sure, you can get around most of this by ignoring all the X11 primitives and using X.org to blit bitmaps for everything, with all the real work done by other toolkits. But in that case, it's those other toolkits doing the heavy lifting, and X.org is just a vestigal wart taking up system resources unnecessarily.
PayPal is not directly regulated by the US federal government, yet they seem to be fairly successful.
PayPal is successful because it's required to use eBay. That's pretty much the only reason. A lot of people have run into trouble with it and wish they could get away from it permanently, but as long as eBay continues to have a monopoly in the online auction business, PayPal will continue to exist. This is why we used to have antitrust laws. (They're still on the books, but are essentially never enforced.)
I've spent hours getting things the way I want on Firefox: organizing buttons, customizing userChrome, killing all possible vestiges of tabs (since they stopped letting you turn that feature off through the menu)... I don't want Australis to break this and shove a Chrome-style UI down my throat. I need traditional menus (the all-in-one on Chrome sucks) and prefer a standard Netscape-style UI. Will there be an opt-out option for this new crap or is someone going to have to fork the codebase? (No, using add-ons for basic functionality is not acceptable.)
ASP.NET requires a Windows server. PHP (and presumably Hack) can be run on any cheap hosted Linux server with cpanel.
That said, ASP.NET/C# is a far better and more coherent development platform than PHP. But PHP's near-zero barrier to entry will keep it on top for the forseeable future.
Or perhaps he "lucked out" and his account with Mt. Gox came out whole with a clean transfer to the outside, while everyone else's bitcoin "disappeared" with the sinking ship.
Under bankruptcy law, this would be known as "fraudulent conveyance". Courts don't look upon this kindly.
So, assuming that he has substantial holdings in bitcoin, then what good does the asset freeze do? He is free to spend bitcoin, unless the asset freeze also prevents businesses from accepting money of any kind from him.
If he violates the court order, it would be treated the same way as if he violated any other court order: he could be held in contempt and sent to jail.
Wake up. Karpeles is a con artist and a sociopath. He'll say anything to string along the suckers for a bit longer. Not a word coming out of his mouth (or from his Twitter feed or whatever) can be believed.
The U.S. government loves to trumpet its drug/laundering asset seizures. Look at Silk Road. This thing was not done in a corner. Nor was the house arrest of Charlie Shrem for alleged Bitcoin-related money laundering covered up in any way.
The only way the government would demand everything stay on the q.t. would be if there was still an ongoing investigation. But if that was the case, then the messy public shutdown of Mt. Gox would have already ruined that. If the government was surveilling Mt. Gox customers and wanted Karpeles to keep his mouth shut, they would have told him to carry on business as usual so no one would be alerted, and Mt. Gox would still be running.
Japan doesn't think Bitcoin is a currency and subsequently has no idea how to deal with MtGox's liabilities, but they most certainly have not obviated them.
How does Japan deal with other insolvent companies that owe liabilities in-kind rather than in raw cash? How would they deal, for instance, with an insolvent grain elevator where the customers' grain went missing? Why not just apply the same principle here?
In Japan, MtGox is not liable because bitcoins aren't money (i.e. nothing real was lost).
Whether or not bitcoins are "money" should be irrelevant. What matters is that they are a thing of value. How do we know they are a thing of value? Because someone is willing to pay for them. Therefore they are an asset, just as (say) a collection of classic cars or rare Atari 2600 games would be an asset. None of them are official currency, but they are things of value, and that value can be defined with a reasonable amount of precision by looking at what people are paying for these items on various markets.
Swapping to OpenGL provides significantly less functionality than DirectX as DirectX isn't just a graphics API.
Pretty much all aspects of DirectX except for Direct3D have been deprecated by Microsoft. They still work, but aren't recommended for new code, and have been superseded by other APIs.
Probably not. The wine guys tend to be more or less anti toward anything that they didn't write and thus can assert that it's not infringement on Microsoft's source code. Accepting that much code from Valve sounds very risky for them.
Valve isn't some fly-by-night operation. They almost certainly have more exposure to legal liability than the Wine project would.
Hopefully they will be using something similar to the M-Disc technology to make this archival format more reliable. Organic dyes don't seem to have quite enough staying power (though I just went through some 10-15 year old CD-Rs the other day and they were still readable).
Just curious, when they start talking about better education, what is that french for?
It's about blaming income inequality on teachers and schools rather than the 1%. And also about washing one's hands of any social responsibility for the well-being of the roughly 70% of Americans who don't have a college degree. (Not that a college degree guarantees middle-class success these days.)
Well, I'll question it. XP, like it or not, is a major part of America's IT infrastructure. Why should one private company have the right to unilaterally declare this kind of planned obsolescence?
If we had sane copyright laws, this wouldn't be an issue – Microsoft would have been required to put the source code in escrow back when XP was first released, and after 5-10 years (i.e. by now) it would automatically become open source. But since we instead have copyright laws bought by Mickey Mouse, there would have to be another way to achieve this. Perhaps one or more governments could use eminent domain to seize XP, then make it open source and fund its maintenance. Not only would that do a great deal of good for the computing public, but it would also light a fire under Microsoft – they would have to compete with free versions of their old OS, and would have an even harder time trying to shove Windows 8 down all our throats.
One possibility is that the site was "hacked", as the operators claim.
The other possibility is that the operators decided that walking off with ~$600,000 worth of Bitcoins was easier and more profitable than continuing to run the site.
Since, apparently, no one knows who the operators are, and there has been no evidence of a hack released to the public, why should we believe that the first thing happened, and not the second?
Funny, but I never remember hearing about Microsoft having to give away Windows XP or Windows 7. (Sure, there was stuff like educational licenses, but those were for specific and clear marketing purposes.) If Microsoft has to literally give away Windows 8 to get people to use it, isn't that a blatant admission of failure? Why do they feel the need to keep digging themselves deeper into this hole?
The community may have been better off keeping mt gox afloat, in order to stabilize the market and thereby averting additional losses in bitcoin market value.
With the collapse of essentially the largest exchange for bitcoin, if indeed bitcoin value plumets even more, what would people rather lose; a few dollars each to inject into mt gox to clear up its debt (getting you long-term stablity), or would you rather let mt gox fail and risk another huge loss in bitcoin value costing people far far more as a whole?
This is the logic behind "too big to fail", and it's basically what the U.S. government did in 2008: bail out all the thieves and crooks on the basis that as unpalatable as that might be, not bailing them out would have much worse consequences on the economy as a whole.
But this is an extremely hard sell. A government can do it (though even then, TARP was rejected by Congress once before they were spooked into passing it by more bad economic news). But there's no way a distributed group of libertarians, many of whom turned to Bitcoin specifically as a reaction to these kinds of shenanigans, is going to be able to pull that off.
There actually is a way they could conceivably fix the problem, if it turns out that one or a small number of people stole the Bitcoins and the thief still has them. You'd also need access to the Mt.Gox records, showing what depositor is supposed to own what. The blockchain could be used to find out where the coins went, and if you could convince 51% of the Bitcoin network to go along, you could take the funds back from the thief/thieves against their will and return them to the depositors. But that only works if most of the money hasn't already been spent, and it would require a massive coordinated effort. Probably not going to happen.
I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.
A car analogy? Sure. You're a classic car collector. Because storing and securing your classic cars is such a pain, you decide to entrust them to a business that is fairly well known and respected in the hobby. This business, for a modest fee, says they will keep your classic cars in a secure garage, and also let you sell them to other collectors who are customers of the same service without having to physically move them.
For a while all this works OK. People deposit their cars for safekeeping, they withdraw their cars, they trade them, everything is fine. A few mix-ups and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a business of this size. Then at some point there's a "security problem" that keeps people from taking their cars back. The business says it's because of some kind of flaw in the software they use to track them, but they're working on getting it fixed. They give a date. The date comes and goes, and people still can't get their cars back. The CEO of the company gives excuses – he can't talk about what actually happened, but he promises everything will be OK if the collectors just give him a bit more time. There are complicated issues, but no, your cars haven't been stolen, pinky swear!
Eventually a hobbyist organization that this CEO is a member of decides to kick him out, and puts out an announcement saying that his company is insolvent – as everyone suspected for some time now, he doesn't have the cars he was supposed to be keeping in safe storage for his customers. No one knows where they went, who has them now, or if the theft was internal or external.
And because this company was holding ~6% of all the classic cars in existence, it's kind of a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if the event was sponsored by Pepsi, yes. That's generally one of the conditions for sponsorship.
There's a big difference between putting up Pepsi logos and branding (which everyone involved said they were fine with) and forbidding anyone to use any drink that isn't a Pepsi product, including water and coffee. No one could reasonably have expected the latter going in.
Nor does corporate sponsorship imply that a "branding consultant" should engage in aggressively sexist behavior that would get someone fired if they did it in any normal white-collar office.
So we're politicizing browser selection now? This amounts to dragging end users into a political dispute that they have nothing to do with. Is this really a road we want to go down? How long before people start blocking IE because they don't like Microsoft's business tactics, or before Apple starts blocking Google Chrome users with a message complaining about alleged patent infringement?
Once this Pandora's box is open, it will be impossible to close. This time it may be aimed at Brendan Eich for the heinous crime of holding onto outdated views of gay marriage a whole two years longer than President Obama, but next time it could be anyone.
What society really needs to do is admit that some people are simply unfit to be in control of a vehicle and deny them a license.
Fail the test three times, that's it. No more chances.
The problem is that America's layout and infrastructure, outside of a few large cities, is configured around the assumption that everyone owns a car. In most parts of the country, if someone can't drive, they won't be able to get to work, do their shopping, or do anything else that is required as part of a normal adult life. Therefore, driving standards are low by necessity, because otherwise you're basically removing someone from normal society. Taking someone's license away is tantamount to putting them under house arrest.
This will eventually be fixed when self-driving cars become mainstream (probably 10-20 years). Most people will be using the auto-driving feature to get where they need to go, and we can then jack up the requirements for manual driving as high as we want without causing trouble.
Isn't it obvious? People who, in previous times, would simply have been considered oddballs are now being diagnosed as autistic. 30 years ago most Americans hadn't even heard of autism, now every parent in the country is on lookout for the warning signs and ready to get a diagnosis at the drop of a hat. I really don't think it's any more complicated than that.
Is there any way they can both lose?
I once went to a BB&T ATM and when I tried to use it, it crashed with an Internet Explorer script error.
X.org, not Wayland. Wayland is still under development. Wayland devs must be elated that Mir has made the debate "Wayland vs Mir" rather than "Tried, trusted, works, and feature complete X.org vs Wayland."
X.org is not "feature complete" in any meaningful sense. It is incapable of doing the kind of GPU-accelerated, alpha-blended compositing that is expected on a modern user interface. Sure, you can get around most of this by ignoring all the X11 primitives and using X.org to blit bitmaps for everything, with all the real work done by other toolkits. But in that case, it's those other toolkits doing the heavy lifting, and X.org is just a vestigal wart taking up system resources unnecessarily.
PayPal is not directly regulated by the US federal government, yet they seem to be fairly successful.
PayPal is successful because it's required to use eBay. That's pretty much the only reason. A lot of people have run into trouble with it and wish they could get away from it permanently, but as long as eBay continues to have a monopoly in the online auction business, PayPal will continue to exist. This is why we used to have antitrust laws. (They're still on the books, but are essentially never enforced.)
I've spent hours getting things the way I want on Firefox: organizing buttons, customizing userChrome, killing all possible vestiges of tabs (since they stopped letting you turn that feature off through the menu)... I don't want Australis to break this and shove a Chrome-style UI down my throat. I need traditional menus (the all-in-one on Chrome sucks) and prefer a standard Netscape-style UI. Will there be an opt-out option for this new crap or is someone going to have to fork the codebase? (No, using add-ons for basic functionality is not acceptable.)
How is this different/better than Asp.Net?
ASP.NET requires a Windows server. PHP (and presumably Hack) can be run on any cheap hosted Linux server with cpanel.
That said, ASP.NET/C# is a far better and more coherent development platform than PHP. But PHP's near-zero barrier to entry will keep it on top for the forseeable future.
Or perhaps he "lucked out" and his account with Mt. Gox came out whole with a clean transfer to the outside, while everyone else's bitcoin "disappeared" with the sinking ship.
Under bankruptcy law, this would be known as "fraudulent conveyance". Courts don't look upon this kindly.
So, assuming that he has substantial holdings in bitcoin, then what good does the asset freeze do? He is free to spend bitcoin, unless the asset freeze also prevents businesses from accepting money of any kind from him.
If he violates the court order, it would be treated the same way as if he violated any other court order: he could be held in contempt and sent to jail.
Wake up. Karpeles is a con artist and a sociopath. He'll say anything to string along the suckers for a bit longer. Not a word coming out of his mouth (or from his Twitter feed or whatever) can be believed.
The U.S. government loves to trumpet its drug/laundering asset seizures. Look at Silk Road. This thing was not done in a corner. Nor was the house arrest of Charlie Shrem for alleged Bitcoin-related money laundering covered up in any way.
The only way the government would demand everything stay on the q.t. would be if there was still an ongoing investigation. But if that was the case, then the messy public shutdown of Mt. Gox would have already ruined that. If the government was surveilling Mt. Gox customers and wanted Karpeles to keep his mouth shut, they would have told him to carry on business as usual so no one would be alerted, and Mt. Gox would still be running.
Japan doesn't think Bitcoin is a currency and subsequently has no idea how to deal with MtGox's liabilities, but they most certainly have not obviated them.
How does Japan deal with other insolvent companies that owe liabilities in-kind rather than in raw cash? How would they deal, for instance, with an insolvent grain elevator where the customers' grain went missing? Why not just apply the same principle here?
In Japan, MtGox is not liable because bitcoins aren't money (i.e. nothing real was lost).
Whether or not bitcoins are "money" should be irrelevant. What matters is that they are a thing of value. How do we know they are a thing of value? Because someone is willing to pay for them. Therefore they are an asset, just as (say) a collection of classic cars or rare Atari 2600 games would be an asset. None of them are official currency, but they are things of value, and that value can be defined with a reasonable amount of precision by looking at what people are paying for these items on various markets.
Swapping to OpenGL provides significantly less functionality than DirectX as DirectX isn't just a graphics API.
Pretty much all aspects of DirectX except for Direct3D have been deprecated by Microsoft. They still work, but aren't recommended for new code, and have been superseded by other APIs.
Probably not. The wine guys tend to be more or less anti toward anything that they didn't write and thus can assert that it's not infringement on Microsoft's source code. Accepting that much code from Valve sounds very risky for them.
Valve isn't some fly-by-night operation. They almost certainly have more exposure to legal liability than the Wine project would.
Hopefully they will be using something similar to the M-Disc technology to make this archival format more reliable. Organic dyes don't seem to have quite enough staying power (though I just went through some 10-15 year old CD-Rs the other day and they were still readable).
Just curious, when they start talking about better education, what is that french for?
It's about blaming income inequality on teachers and schools rather than the 1%. And also about washing one's hands of any social responsibility for the well-being of the roughly 70% of Americans who don't have a college degree. (Not that a college degree guarantees middle-class success these days.)
Microsoft's right to kill XP is unquestioned
Well, I'll question it. XP, like it or not, is a major part of America's IT infrastructure. Why should one private company have the right to unilaterally declare this kind of planned obsolescence?
If we had sane copyright laws, this wouldn't be an issue – Microsoft would have been required to put the source code in escrow back when XP was first released, and after 5-10 years (i.e. by now) it would automatically become open source. But since we instead have copyright laws bought by Mickey Mouse, there would have to be another way to achieve this. Perhaps one or more governments could use eminent domain to seize XP, then make it open source and fund its maintenance. Not only would that do a great deal of good for the computing public, but it would also light a fire under Microsoft – they would have to compete with free versions of their old OS, and would have an even harder time trying to shove Windows 8 down all our throats.
One possibility is that the site was "hacked", as the operators claim.
The other possibility is that the operators decided that walking off with ~$600,000 worth of Bitcoins was easier and more profitable than continuing to run the site.
Since, apparently, no one knows who the operators are, and there has been no evidence of a hack released to the public, why should we believe that the first thing happened, and not the second?
Funny, but I never remember hearing about Microsoft having to give away Windows XP or Windows 7. (Sure, there was stuff like educational licenses, but those were for specific and clear marketing purposes.) If Microsoft has to literally give away Windows 8 to get people to use it, isn't that a blatant admission of failure? Why do they feel the need to keep digging themselves deeper into this hole?
How exactly are they then going to "take the funds back from the thief/thieves against their will"? The Japanese government doesn't care.
By forking the protocol. Bitcoin works by majority vote: whatever 51% of the hashing power on the network says, goes.
The community may have been better off keeping mt gox afloat, in order to stabilize the market and thereby averting additional losses in bitcoin market value.
With the collapse of essentially the largest exchange for bitcoin, if indeed bitcoin value plumets even more, what would people rather lose; a few dollars each to inject into mt gox to clear up its debt (getting you long-term stablity), or would you rather let mt gox fail and risk another huge loss in bitcoin value costing people far far more as a whole?
This is the logic behind "too big to fail", and it's basically what the U.S. government did in 2008: bail out all the thieves and crooks on the basis that as unpalatable as that might be, not bailing them out would have much worse consequences on the economy as a whole.
But this is an extremely hard sell. A government can do it (though even then, TARP was rejected by Congress once before they were spooked into passing it by more bad economic news). But there's no way a distributed group of libertarians, many of whom turned to Bitcoin specifically as a reaction to these kinds of shenanigans, is going to be able to pull that off.
There actually is a way they could conceivably fix the problem, if it turns out that one or a small number of people stole the Bitcoins and the thief still has them. You'd also need access to the Mt.Gox records, showing what depositor is supposed to own what. The blockchain could be used to find out where the coins went, and if you could convince 51% of the Bitcoin network to go along, you could take the funds back from the thief/thieves against their will and return them to the depositors. But that only works if most of the money hasn't already been spent, and it would require a massive coordinated effort. Probably not going to happen.
I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.
A car analogy? Sure. You're a classic car collector. Because storing and securing your classic cars is such a pain, you decide to entrust them to a business that is fairly well known and respected in the hobby. This business, for a modest fee, says they will keep your classic cars in a secure garage, and also let you sell them to other collectors who are customers of the same service without having to physically move them.
For a while all this works OK. People deposit their cars for safekeeping, they withdraw their cars, they trade them, everything is fine. A few mix-ups and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a business of this size. Then at some point there's a "security problem" that keeps people from taking their cars back. The business says it's because of some kind of flaw in the software they use to track them, but they're working on getting it fixed. They give a date. The date comes and goes, and people still can't get their cars back. The CEO of the company gives excuses – he can't talk about what actually happened, but he promises everything will be OK if the collectors just give him a bit more time. There are complicated issues, but no, your cars haven't been stolen, pinky swear!
Eventually a hobbyist organization that this CEO is a member of decides to kick him out, and puts out an announcement saying that his company is insolvent – as everyone suspected for some time now, he doesn't have the cars he was supposed to be keeping in safe storage for his customers. No one knows where they went, who has them now, or if the theft was internal or external.
And because this company was holding ~6% of all the classic cars in existence, it's kind of a big deal.