Because Bitcoins @ $5 is the same as Bitcoins @ $10,000?
You don't seriously think that were bitcoin to be successful, the Internet trolls posting a message would have the same effect as that same message would have now?
You're correct there is risk trading with Bitcoin right now; but as the market grows that risk reduces. As the risk reduces it becomes a more attractive currency. It remains to be seen of course, but "never legit" is just hyperbole.
You can exchange bitcoins for legal tender at any one of the exchanges.
You can use bitcoins to buy amazon products (there is a bitcoin trader who will make the order for you).
The grocery thing is not common yet, but there are food stores for bitcoin and one of the most famous early transactions in Bitcoin was someone bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC. If the pizza guy kept those coins, he would now be worth $300,000.
I stumbled across this website last year. It is a very small (at present) political party. As far as I know, the only one who actively states they will scrap this state monitoring nonsense.
Hopefully, some of the other parties will realise that people don't want to be monitored, and there are votes to be had out of it.
This is analogous to film classification. I am very very much in favour of films being classified. Everyone should have enough information to make a choice about what films they want to watch. However, when people start talking about banning films, my skin starts to crawl. Who are these people to decide what the rest of us should be allowed to view?
Similarly with food. Foods should, unquestionably, be held to a high standard, they should be very clearly labelled. If you want, put cigarette-style warnings on them - this food will make you fat and ugly and no one will ever sleep with you - but banning food? Madness. Nanny state going mad.
In Scotland, there are some local governments who are paying nurses (bearing in mind how dreadfully under resourced the NHS is) to go to shopping centres and tell fat people they are fat. They are paying these highly qualified nurses with my tax money. I find it utterly ridiculous.
What I think about machine guns and where I live has nothing to do with my original point (which I notice you chose not to address): why should a government tell me what I can eat?
As it seems to matter to you: relaxed gun laws have an effect on others than the owner. Most people are idiots (as you are so adequately demonstrating), and so letting them own dangerous weapons would be bad for the rest of us. Letting them eat burgers - not so much.
News flash: Police have been called in after a 30 stone man has been seen walking the streets brandishing a kebab. So far no one has been injured, but police say that at this time they can't be sure at the fat bastards mental state, so they are taking a precautionary stance. The police have brought in a nutritionist to try to talk the pieman into trading his kebab for a nice salad, but so far he has continued to put on weight.
You say you want the government to regulate what you can eat. I say I don't want to be regulated. You say that I am therefore in favour of eating arsenic-laced, asbestos-wrapped dog food.
For the hard of thinking then: regulating what goes in food is not the same as regulating what foods are available. Further, if a company wanted to sell "NEW: CRUNCHY BURGERS WITH ADDED DOG FOOD, ARSENIC AND ASBESTOS", as long as it says it in big letters on the bag I should be allowed to eat it if I want. I doubt it would be a successful company, but it is not the place of government to decide that.
And yes, I would prefer a little more libertarian attitude from my government, who seem to think they are entitled to run my entire life. In my scheme I get to eat what I choose, in your scheme you want someone to tell you what to eat... like a six year old. On the other hand, your jibe that I am a six year old because I am libertarian with strong political views was right on the money - that was a metaphor that's going to sting later.
"regulate our food"? What the hell is wrong with you? Are you six? If you don't want to eat something, don't eat it. If you don't have any self-control then check yourself into an addiction clinic. Please don't suggest that this already utterly invasive, privacy-destroying hydra of a government start regulating what the rest of us can eat.
I work hard, and pay my taxes. If I want to come home and eat twenty chocolate bars, that I bought with the dregs of my salary that the government have left me with, then I damned well will.
I think you've missed the point. I mentioned SHA1 so you've focussed on that. The actual mechanics of the system aren't important - and it doesn't matter how opaque those mechanics are. It might require 100 PhDs to design - who cares? The point is that by making it possible to for the voter to confirm their own vote (or some independent party if you don't want voters to have the hash to prevent your vote selling concern) the system can be as arcane as you like but it is verifiable because both ends must be equal.
What has vote selling got to do with anything? That's just as possible with paper votes.
Don't want the dodgy vote buyer to be able to verify my vote - don't give people the hash as I described - just keep it on a piece of paper in the voting booth.
This is missing the point - what I am saying is that it is trivial to make an e-voting system that can be end-to-end verified, with as much (if not more because of the option of letting the voter verify themselves) certainty than a paper system.
I really don't get why it's seen as so hard. Here, I'll make one up for you right now; this process would run for every voter. Each vote is not linked to the individual, so the vote remains secret, but is simple to trace:
- "Please enter a 6 digit random number" = X
- "Please enter your vote" = V
- INSERT INTO Votes SHA1HASH( X || Now() ), V
- "Here is a printout summarising your vote. The long number
may be used at a later date to confirm that your vote was
correctly recorded"
Now - how hard was that? Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote. If what shows on the website is not equal to what I thought I voted for any significant number of people, then vote rigging has occurred.
There are a whole load of variations, but the principle would be the same in all. The voter can confirm that their vote was correctly recorded independently. The vote is stored using a secret number that is supplied/known only to the voter.
As it is, no operating system has ever run faster than it's predecessor on the same hardware. Whether you're talking OS/360 (what's that grandad?), VMS, BSD/Sys5 Unixes, probably even linuxes - tho' there are so many variants, it's impossible to know for all of them.
You're telling me it's impossible to know that probably no Linux has ever run faster than it's predecessor? Maybe.
Convincing stuff.
C'mon, if you're going to shout opinions as if they are facts, at least have the decency to do it with a bit of self-confidence. Throw those qualifiers away. YAY!
Having a closed, BSD-licensed compiler helps restrict competition in their markets, and the BSD license allows this. GPL does not.
Wow, that sounds great. Sign me up.
Embedded work is far better when the toolchain is based on GCC. Every proprietary compiler I've used has been a fight just to get started. I recently tried out avr-gcc and was delighted, all the GCC experience I had just dropped straight in.
Shame on any manufacturer who doesn't add a GCC backend for their CPU.
Severely mentally handicapped people deserve rights when they can ask for them. The moment they can make a sign asking for equal treatment, I say we give it to them. Until then it's soylent cola all round.
I'm not really arguing for or against giving primates human rights; I am pointing out that being able to ask for rights is not a measure of whether one should get them.
Repeat after me. It's okay. This is a site for geeks. I don't have to pretend to be cool here. Being interested in encryption does not make me a bad person. I am not in high school any more.
This is because Intel's graphics chipsets are crippled and don't implement any of the features covered by other companies' patents which force ATI and NVidia to go closed-source.
And I should care about that why?
Intel cards are not bleeding edge. However, if all you want is a reasonably powerful, 3D supporting card for your open source desktop, then they are perfect. I don't require a huge framerate in $LATEST_GAME, because I don't play it. If I did, then an Intel card would obviously not be for me.
My intel-based graphics work perfectly, and don't give a moments trouble. I can run 3D applications if I want, and a flashy eye-candy-full desktop too. I previously had an nVidia card, and it was nothing but a fight - is my card supported with this release of the driver? Is it crashing my computer? Is it going to compile with the latest kernel?
Nowadays, I do nothing but apt-get upgrade to keep my graphics in order and I am a lot happier for it.
Unless you think you wrote Happy Birthday, you did do it knowingly.
This is the point that the OP was trying to make. Patents are dangerous because something you made up can be infringing. If there were a patent on "songs sung to mark the celebration of the anniversary of an individual's birth", then even if you wrote a happy birthday song for your friend you would be in violation.
Incidentally if you think the above analogy is a silly one - no one could patent such a thing; then it is a perfect lesson in why software patents are so silly.
You can, in fact, download the original version of VisiCalc -- the original spreadsheet program, released for MS-DOS in 1981 -- and run it, unmodified, in DOSEMU under any version of Linux you feel like.
It's been a while since I used AutoCAD, so perhaps it's moved on significantly since then; but I'd be surprised if anyone does any real work with AutoCAD any more. It's essentially a tool for teaching students about CAD.
If you're actually building any kind of real object, then you're probably using Pro/E or Solidworks. If you're not, then you're wasting a lot of your own time.
Am I wrong? Once you've done 3D parametric modelling, you wouldn't want to go back to AutoCAD.
Why bother? dpkg/deb is maintained and does everything that rpm does. These days we all use frontends to rpm/dpkg (yum/apt) anyway, so what does it matter what the archive format is?
Isn't this like picking between gzip and bzip? Just pick the one that suits you better. The choice in this case is between the unmaintained rpm and the maintained dpkg. If it really bothers redhat, just fork dpkg and call it rpm. As if it makes any difference at all to end users.
What magical feature are they going to add to new-rpm that is going to make it better than dpkg?
Perhaps out in Slashdot land, Linus is worshipped. However, from what I see of the mailing lists he posts on people are perfectly willing to disagree with him. On that basis, it doesn't seem like false modesty at all.
Certainly, OpenOffice.org should be able to handle more than 32,000 rows - I have no argument with you there.
Should you be using 32,000 rows? No way.
Any spreadsheet that won't fit on a few sheets of paper should be a database.
Typical response: "but databases are so hard to use..."; cry me a river - that's like saying, "I don't know how to use a saw so I'm going to cut this tree down with a stapler"
Slashdot Mirror
Because Bitcoins @ $5 is the same as Bitcoins @ $10,000?
You don't seriously think that were bitcoin to be successful, the Internet trolls posting a message would have the same effect as that same message would have now?
You're correct there is risk trading with Bitcoin right now; but as the market grows that risk reduces. As the risk reduces it becomes a more attractive currency. It remains to be seen of course, but "never legit" is just hyperbole.
You can exchange bitcoins for legal tender at any one of the exchanges.
You can use bitcoins to buy amazon products (there is a bitcoin trader who will make the order for you).
The grocery thing is not common yet, but there are food stores for bitcoin and one of the most famous early transactions in Bitcoin was someone bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC. If the pizza guy kept those coins, he would now be worth $300,000.
http://lpuk.org/
I stumbled across this website last year. It is a very small (at present) political party. As far as I know, the only one who actively states they will scrap this state monitoring nonsense.
Hopefully, some of the other parties will realise that people don't want to be monitored, and there are votes to be had out of it.
Your arithmetic is up the shoot.
64 ASCII characters translates to 128 hex digits.
128 hex digits (four bits each) is 512 bits.
I don't disagree with your sentiment here.
This is analogous to film classification. I am very very much in favour of films being classified. Everyone should have enough information to make a choice about what films they want to watch. However, when people start talking about banning films, my skin starts to crawl. Who are these people to decide what the rest of us should be allowed to view?
Similarly with food. Foods should, unquestionably, be held to a high standard, they should be very clearly labelled. If you want, put cigarette-style warnings on them - this food will make you fat and ugly and no one will ever sleep with you - but banning food? Madness. Nanny state going mad.
In Scotland, there are some local governments who are paying nurses (bearing in mind how dreadfully under resourced the NHS is) to go to shopping centres and tell fat people they are fat. They are paying these highly qualified nurses with my tax money. I find it utterly ridiculous.
Ad hominem now. You're doing very well.
What I think about machine guns and where I live has nothing to do with my original point (which I notice you chose not to address): why should a government tell me what I can eat?
As it seems to matter to you: relaxed gun laws have an effect on others than the owner. Most people are idiots (as you are so adequately demonstrating), and so letting them own dangerous weapons would be bad for the rest of us. Letting them eat burgers - not so much.
News flash: Police have been called in after a 30 stone man has been seen walking the streets brandishing a kebab. So far no one has been injured, but police say that at this time they can't be sure at the fat bastards mental state, so they are taking a precautionary stance. The police have brought in a nutritionist to try to talk the pieman into trading his kebab for a nice salad, but so far he has continued to put on weight.
P.S. I am not American.
Nice straw man.
You say you want the government to regulate what you can eat.
I say I don't want to be regulated.
You say that I am therefore in favour of eating arsenic-laced, asbestos-wrapped dog food.
For the hard of thinking then: regulating what goes in food is not the same as regulating what foods are available. Further, if a company wanted to sell "NEW: CRUNCHY BURGERS WITH ADDED DOG FOOD, ARSENIC AND ASBESTOS", as long as it says it in big letters on the bag I should be allowed to eat it if I want. I doubt it would be a successful company, but it is not the place of government to decide that.
And yes, I would prefer a little more libertarian attitude from my government, who seem to think they are entitled to run my entire life. In my scheme I get to eat what I choose, in your scheme you want someone to tell you what to eat... like a six year old. On the other hand, your jibe that I am a six year old because I am libertarian with strong political views was right on the money - that was a metaphor that's going to sting later.
"regulate our food"? What the hell is wrong with you? Are you six? If you don't want to eat something, don't eat it. If you don't have any self-control then check yourself into an addiction clinic. Please don't suggest that this already utterly invasive, privacy-destroying hydra of a government start regulating what the rest of us can eat.
I work hard, and pay my taxes. If I want to come home and eat twenty chocolate bars, that I bought with the dregs of my salary that the government have left me with, then I damned well will.
Oh, the ironing is delicious.
I think you've missed the point. I mentioned SHA1 so you've focussed on that. The actual mechanics of the system aren't important - and it doesn't matter how opaque those mechanics are. It might require 100 PhDs to design - who cares? The point is that by making it possible to for the voter to confirm their own vote (or some independent party if you don't want voters to have the hash to prevent your vote selling concern) the system can be as arcane as you like but it is verifiable because both ends must be equal.
What has vote selling got to do with anything? That's just as possible with paper votes.
Don't want the dodgy vote buyer to be able to verify my vote - don't give people the hash as I described - just keep it on a piece of paper in the voting booth.
This is missing the point - what I am saying is that it is trivial to make an e-voting system that can be end-to-end verified, with as much (if not more because of the option of letting the voter verify themselves) certainty than a paper system.
I really don't get why it's seen as so hard. Here, I'll make one up for you right now; this process would run for every voter. Each vote is not linked to the individual, so the vote remains secret, but is simple to trace:
- "Please enter a 6 digit random number" = X
- "Please enter your vote" = V
- INSERT INTO Votes SHA1HASH( X || Now() ), V
- "Here is a printout summarising your vote. The long number
may be used at a later date to confirm that your vote was
correctly recorded"
Now - how hard was that? Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote. If what shows on the website is not equal to what I thought I voted for any significant number of people, then vote rigging has occurred.
There are a whole load of variations, but the principle would be the same in all. The voter can confirm that their vote was correctly recorded independently. The vote is stored using a secret number that is supplied/known only to the voter.
Some might argue that open source is technological progress.
You're telling me it's impossible to know that probably no Linux has ever run faster than it's predecessor? Maybe.
Convincing stuff.
C'mon, if you're going to shout opinions as if they are facts, at least have the decency to do it with a bit of self-confidence. Throw those qualifiers away. YAY!
Of course they do. Don't be silly.
Fingers and hands are both covered in skin, therefore they sweat.
Wow, that sounds great. Sign me up.
Embedded work is far better when the toolchain is based on GCC. Every proprietary compiler I've used has been a fight just to get started. I recently tried out avr-gcc and was delighted, all the GCC experience I had just dropped straight in.
Shame on any manufacturer who doesn't add a GCC backend for their CPU.
Severely mentally handicapped people deserve rights when they can ask for them. The moment they can make a sign asking for equal treatment, I say we give it to them. Until then it's soylent cola all round.
I'm not really arguing for or against giving primates human rights; I am pointing out that being able to ask for rights is not a measure of whether one should get them.
Repeat after me. It's okay. This is a site for geeks. I don't have to pretend to be cool here. Being interested in encryption does not make me a bad person. I am not in high school any more.
And I should care about that why?
Intel cards are not bleeding edge. However, if all you want is a reasonably powerful, 3D supporting card for your open source desktop, then they are perfect. I don't require a huge framerate in $LATEST_GAME, because I don't play it. If I did, then an Intel card would obviously not be for me.
My intel-based graphics work perfectly, and don't give a moments trouble. I can run 3D applications if I want, and a flashy eye-candy-full desktop too. I previously had an nVidia card, and it was nothing but a fight - is my card supported with this release of the driver? Is it crashing my computer? Is it going to compile with the latest kernel?
Nowadays, I do nothing but apt-get upgrade to keep my graphics in order and I am a lot happier for it.
Unless you think you wrote Happy Birthday, you did do it knowingly.
This is the point that the OP was trying to make. Patents are dangerous because something you made up can be infringing. If there were a patent on "songs sung to mark the celebration of the anniversary of an individual's birth", then even if you wrote a happy birthday song for your friend you would be in violation.
Incidentally if you think the above analogy is a silly one - no one could patent such a thing; then it is a perfect lesson in why software patents are so silly.
You can, in fact, download the original version of VisiCalc -- the original spreadsheet program, released for MS-DOS in 1981 -- and run it, unmodified, in DOSEMU under any version of Linux you feel like.
It's been a while since I used AutoCAD, so perhaps it's moved on significantly since then; but I'd be surprised if anyone does any real work with AutoCAD any more. It's essentially a tool for teaching students about CAD.
If you're actually building any kind of real object, then you're probably using Pro/E or Solidworks. If you're not, then you're wasting a lot of your own time.
Am I wrong? Once you've done 3D parametric modelling, you wouldn't want to go back to AutoCAD.
Why bother? dpkg/deb is maintained and does everything that rpm does. These days we all use frontends to rpm/dpkg (yum/apt) anyway, so what does it matter what the archive format is?
Isn't this like picking between gzip and bzip? Just pick the one that suits you better. The choice in this case is between the unmaintained rpm and the maintained dpkg. If it really bothers redhat, just fork dpkg and call it rpm. As if it makes any difference at all to end users.
What magical feature are they going to add to new-rpm that is going to make it better than dpkg?
Perhaps out in Slashdot land, Linus is worshipped. However, from what I see of the mailing lists he posts on people are perfectly willing to disagree with him. On that basis, it doesn't seem like false modesty at all.
Certainly, OpenOffice.org should be able to handle more than 32,000 rows - I have no argument with you there.
Should you be using 32,000 rows? No way.
Any spreadsheet that won't fit on a few sheets of paper should be a database.
Typical response: "but databases are so hard to use..."; cry me a river - that's like saying, "I don't know how to use a saw so I'm going to cut this tree down with a stapler"