The United States government really does care about BTC and has a strong interest in killing it, because BTC enables international money transfers outside the banking network. The United States government enjoys de facto control over the interbank network, which it uses to bully countries which it doesn't like (for example, you can't transfer money to a bank in Iran).
It is therefore entirely plausible that the current DDOS attack on BTC is mounted by agencies of the US government. It has the motive, it has the means. In the absence of evidence about the identity of the attacker, the US government is the #1 suspect.
No one has ever proven or even credibly suggested that Windows or OSX is easier to use than Linux
I'll prove it to you right here, right now.
1: Procedure to use Windows
Go into computer store, buy computer, take it home, turn it on. Wait for it to boot.You are now using Windows.
2: Procedure to use Linux
Go into computer store, buy computer, take it home, turn it on. Find out where to download a Linux distro from. Download enough to do network install. Burn it on a CD. Boot from the CD. Select installation options...
Need I continue?
And yes, I do realise that isn't what you meant, but the proof it still valid, and explains why Windows has approximately 100 times as many users as GNU/Linux on the desktop, and will have for the foreseeable future.
Neither the post, nor the article linked, tell us much. "Open Source" just says that some people can read the source code. It doesn't tell us:
Who can read the source (licensees only?)
What you're allowed to do with the source
"Open source" doesn't mean "public domain". Somebody still owns the copyright, and can make permission to copy the source conditional on acceptance of a license. Then the terms of that license are all-important.
You assume the United States is the only one with a stupid government.
And you are too ready to call people "stupid" instead of thinking.
Politicians, broadly speaking, are not stupid. The rewards which flow to a successful politician - money and power - are huge. There is therefore a lot of competition. Stupid people have no chance.
Politicians say stupid things pretty often. That's not because they believe what they're saying; it's because saying those things will get them more votes.
Politicians often pass legislation which harms the people they represent. But the majority of voters don't follow complex issues, so that doesn't affect re-electability. In most cases, the legislation is in response to some special interest. The purpose of passing it is usually to get more campaign donations. It is relatively cheap for large corporations to buy the legislation they want in this way (here's an example).
Our pols are not stupid, just unethical. But our political system seems to favor unscrupulous people.
I don't know why Microsoft is bending over for the media companies.
They're not. Microsoft has a monopoly. They can tell anyone to get lost.
But "compliance" with "requirements" of the RIAA and MPAA is perfect cover for their real game plan, which is to eliminate Open Source (Linux, etc). If Microsoft simply pressured hardware manufacturers (video cards etc) never to release specs, and also to spend billions making it impossible to reverse-engineer their programming specs, just to stop programmers from developing Linux drivers, they'd lose an antitrust action in court.
But by wrapping the plan up in the excuse that it's to meet RIAA and MPAA requirements, Microsoft has a perfect defense.
At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE.
I use Gnome, but it sure has usability issues. I hope the Gnome developers will take the trouble to understand why Birmingham dumped Gnome - sfter selecting it initially.
You've been drinking the RIAA's Kool-Aid. Transferring music one has paid for to another medium for one's own use is not "piracy" according to most people's concept of that notion.
In all seriousness that's actually a great gift for someone with an old record collection which is pretty much everyone over 40 or 50.
I'm over 50 and so are most of my friends, and I don't know anyone who kept their old records. We deep-sixed that junk a decade ago. One of the many bad things about vinyl records is that they wear out. It doesn't matter how light the pickup is, the essential working of a vinyl record is a piece of diamond scraping in a plastic groove, every time that happens the plastic groove is going to wear a little bit.
Of course some people did keep their record collection but I think it's a tiny minority, and it certainly isn't "pretty much everyone".
The article says: "A university student from China has been arrested for illegally engaging in business activities outside the restrictions of his student visa, police said."Arrested, not deported.
Of course it's an English summary of a Japanese original. Does anyone here read Japanese well enough to check the original source?
About the discrepancy in the money amounts mentioned in another reply: 6 million yen is what the student has admitted. That's nowhere near $1 million. Police suspect his total profit is 100 million yen, which is near enough $1 million.
Patents used to be valid for 20 years from date of filing, now a company can sit on it, tweek it, and get 17 years from date of issue (AFIK).
It's the other way round: Patents used to be valid for 17 years from date of issue (allowing 'submarine' patents). Since 1995, they are valid for 20 years from date of filing.
That's a broad summary of the situation; for the details see a law site, e.g. here.
For 40 years, NASA has been sending astronauts into low Earth orbit and calling it "spaceflight". Dinking around in LEO is not space travel.
OK, there was the Apollo program. That begins to count. But the Apollo astronauts were still, at all times, within the Earth's gravity well (the moon is gravitationally bound to the Earth).
But now...
"That kind of early demonstration mission might last no more than 60 or 90 days," Durda said, "and take the crew no farther than a few lunar distances away from Earth."
Finally. A human being is going to travel in space. Not very far. But it's a start, after decades of pitiful pretence.
Is organization not a talent?
People skills aren't easy to master.
No, it's not; and yes, they are. I was a software developer, and became a manager. I was seen as a very good manager. I found the job pretty boring - I could do the work in about 20 hours/week (after all, the key skill is delegating as much as possible). In the end, I went back to software development, mainly because I found it more satisfying.
Of course I could have got a lot more money by working my way up the hierarchy, but not having been brought up in the USA, I don't regard accumulating/spending money as the purpose of life. I have enough money for my needs and my wife's.
The original article points out that keeping logs is incompatible with existing German law. But the law will soon be changed, because Germany will have to comply with an EU directive mandating that logs be kept for at least 6 months. Germany has already asked for an extension of the deadline to comply with this, but the strong likelihood is that the German privacy laws will be changed to comply with the EU-mandated snooping.
EU pols and bureaucrats are as hostile to personal privacy as US pols and bureaucrats.
So they have to believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show.
The media nowadays will publish whatever sells more advertising. That means: whatever sounds most sensational. Forecasting climate catastrophe sounds pretty sensational. It attracts more readers, generates more controversy, and (most important!) sells more advertising. So the media will go for it.
You not only don't have to "believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show"; you're an idiot if you do.
You can look at the prediction track record of the people who are quoted. And understanding Monckton's criticisms is not rocket science. He says the graphs produced by the global-warming doomsayers in 2001 suppress the medieval warm period. By golly, he's right. The graph makes it look as though the current warming is exceptional, but it isn't. Fluctuations happen. The warming between 1000 and about 1400 AD was more than the current warming, and it's mentioned in many historical sources (e.g. Wikipedia) and has been confirmed by many studies. You don't need calculus to understand stuff like this.
It is prudent to be alert to risks of changing the climate. Modest measures to reduce our gross waste of fossil fuels would be sensible. For example, if the US raised its gasoline taxes to European levels, Americans might be less inclined to buy SUVs. But extreme and costly measures seem foolish.
If there are 2 proposed solutions to a problem - one boring and sensible (e.g. "let's stop wasting so much energy") and one that sounds as though it's the brainchild of a 12-year-old on crack - the media will emphasize the second one.
The goal of today's journalist isn't to inform; it's to attract attention and get a response. Because that's what pleases the advertisers, who are the customers who count.
Well, let's see. Iran has not attacked any other nation, except in direct response to being attacked (by Iraq in 1980), for about the last thousand years. Doesn't seem like much of a threat to me.
On the other hand, there's a country much bigger than Iran which seems to bomb or invade a different country every 3 or 4 years... Panama, Grenada, Libya, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq just since 1980, and I've probably missed a couple. I think it might be a good idea to have a deterrent to being attacked by that country, don't you?
Another thing: in return for licensing Novell to use its patents, Microsoft will get paid a small "tax" on certain sales by Novell. So that when somebody buys Novell Linux with a support contract, they're also paying Microsoft, which uses part of its revenue to try to destroy or cripple Linux.
Novell, and its legal team, has clearly calculated that it can simply screw all the people who wrote the software that Novell bundles and sells in its distro. Novell has enough good lawyers, and it's probably right.
For what it is worth, though, I shall make damn sure that anybody who asks me for advice about Linux is steered away from Novell.
I live in the EU, there are no software patents in my country an there won't be any in the future
My friend and fellow European, I sincerely hope you are right.
But I fear you are wrong. In fact, the more people think (like you) that there is no threat, the more likely it is that the megacorporations will win. They want software patents, to strangle small competitors before they can grow. They will not rest until they have software patents. The politicians won't help much - many of them are in the pockets of the megacorps anyway. To keep Europe free of software patents will require an ongoing effort by a lot of volunteers for many years.
but is Flash really required for this? Couldn't it be done another way?
No, Flash is not really required. It could all have been done with Javascript and images, plus possibly image maps.
I imagine that clicking is easier to manage than careful mouse manipulation for people with disabilities.
I'm not disabled, but I'm getting on a bit, (age > 60) and I find clicking a bit troublesome. (Double-clicking is really troublesome, I can't imagine why anyone ever thought that double-clicking was a good idea.) Remember that the sensitivity of mouse movement is adjustable in most GUIs, so pointer manipulation is unlikely to be a problem for anyone.
Hardware virtualization, as recently introduced by Intel and AMD, is very powerful technology. It's my personal opinion that this technology has been introduced a little bit too early
Virtualization was used in commercial machines as long ago as the early 1970s - IBM's VM/370 product was announced in 1972. The amount of hardware assistance for the virtualization depended on the 370 model. But this was the same kind of virtualization as recently introduced by Intel. You could run multiple different IBM operating systems under VM/370, and you could even run VM/370 under VM/370.
Since when are Peace Prizes given out to people who invent phyological/sonic/whateveryouwanttocallit weapons?
If the teenager-repellent were designed to exterminate teenagers, you'd have a point. But it isn't. It's just designed to persuade them to go somewhere where they don't annoy people. It's not a weapon of any kind.
You do understand the difference between insecticide and mosquito repellent, don't you?
Fund/find an alternative, and you will see Amazon fix itself.
A major point of the article is that this is not possible because of the network effect - people who want to buy a book online go to Amazon, because Amazon has all the books and "just works".
As the article puts it:
As an academic, I am very interested in network effects - the curious economic features of networks, which increase in value as they increase in size. Does this mean that customers will be "locked in" to the system that achieves ubiquity? (...) Does this threaten the efficiency that the networked economy was supposed to provide? As a vendor, I fume and rant, but am unable to convince myself that we can shift distributors: will the people who want our books trust an unfamiliar name?
The education is being with people as smart as you, as young as you.
For me, the most educational thing about college was being with people smarter than me. I went to a small obscure high school, where I was easily the smartest kid around, and got into a top-notch college. I found out that I wasn't as bright as I'd thought I was.
Different people get different things out of college. Perhaps most of us are not qualified to judge what a person brighter than us gets out of it. Having read your remarks, I'm pretty sure that you're not qualified to judge Mr Banh's needs.
Traditional code reviews tend to be frustrating for the programmers, because the reviewers are in position of authority.
That's because most organizations don't know how to run code reviews properly.
For example, the reviewers should not be in a position of authority. Their role is to raise issues with the code. How to resolve those issues is entirely at the discretion of the programmer. Whether an issue requires any action at all is the programmer's decision.
Most programmers want to do excellent work, and will use the comments from the review to improve their code. If you have a programmer who does not want to do excellent work, the whole exercise is pointless - but if you have a programmer who does not want to do excellent work, you are in trouble in any case.
Slashdot Mirror
Government doesn't really care about BTC
The United States government really does care about BTC and has a strong interest in killing it, because BTC enables international money transfers outside the banking network. The United States government enjoys de facto control over the interbank network, which it uses to bully countries which it doesn't like (for example, you can't transfer money to a bank in Iran). It is therefore entirely plausible that the current DDOS attack on BTC is mounted by agencies of the US government. It has the motive, it has the means. In the absence of evidence about the identity of the attacker, the US government is the #1 suspect.
No one has ever proven or even credibly suggested that Windows or OSX is easier to use than Linux
I'll prove it to you right here, right now.
1: Procedure to use Windows
Go into computer store, buy computer, take it home, turn it on. Wait for it to boot.You are now using Windows.
2: Procedure to use Linux ...
Go into computer store, buy computer, take it home, turn it on. Find out where to download a Linux distro from. Download enough to do network install. Burn it on a CD. Boot from the CD. Select installation options
Need I continue?
And yes, I do realise that isn't what you meant, but the proof it still valid, and explains why Windows has approximately 100 times as many users as GNU/Linux on the desktop, and will have for the foreseeable future.
Neither the post, nor the article linked, tell us much. "Open Source" just says that some people can read the source code. It doesn't tell us:
"Open source" doesn't mean "public domain". Somebody still owns the copyright, and can make permission to copy the source conditional on acceptance of a license. Then the terms of that license are all-important.
I've never heard of any really big organization installing any new Microsoft OS before Service Pack 2 comes out.
SP1 usually fixes most of the really bad bugs, then SP2 fixes the bugs introduced by SP1. That's how it's been for about the last 12 years.
You assume the United States is the only one with a stupid government.
And you are too ready to call people "stupid" instead of thinking.
Politicians, broadly speaking, are not stupid. The rewards which flow to a successful politician - money and power - are huge. There is therefore a lot of competition. Stupid people have no chance.
Politicians say stupid things pretty often. That's not because they believe what they're saying; it's because saying those things will get them more votes.
Politicians often pass legislation which harms the people they represent. But the majority of voters don't follow complex issues, so that doesn't affect re-electability. In most cases, the legislation is in response to some special interest. The purpose of passing it is usually to get more campaign donations. It is relatively cheap for large corporations to buy the legislation they want in this way (here's an example).
Our pols are not stupid, just unethical. But our political system seems to favor unscrupulous people.
I don't know why Microsoft is bending over for the media companies.
They're not. Microsoft has a monopoly. They can tell anyone to get lost.
But "compliance" with "requirements" of the RIAA and MPAA is perfect cover for their real game plan, which is to eliminate Open Source (Linux, etc). If Microsoft simply pressured hardware manufacturers (video cards etc) never to release specs, and also to spend billions making it impossible to reverse-engineer their programming specs, just to stop programmers from developing Linux drivers, they'd lose an antitrust action in court.
But by wrapping the plan up in the excuse that it's to meet RIAA and MPAA requirements, Microsoft has a perfect defense.
At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE.
I use Gnome, but it sure has usability issues. I hope the Gnome developers will take the trouble to understand why Birmingham dumped Gnome - sfter selecting it initially.
Thanks! I can finally pirate my records!
You've been drinking the RIAA's Kool-Aid. Transferring music one has paid for to another medium for one's own use is not "piracy" according to most people's concept of that notion.
In all seriousness that's actually a great gift for someone with an old record collection which is pretty much everyone over 40 or 50.
I'm over 50 and so are most of my friends, and I don't know anyone who kept their old records. We deep-sixed that junk a decade ago. One of the many bad things about vinyl records is that they wear out. It doesn't matter how light the pickup is, the essential working of a vinyl record is a piece of diamond scraping in a plastic groove, every time that happens the plastic groove is going to wear a little bit.
Of course some people did keep their record collection but I think it's a tiny minority, and it certainly isn't "pretty much everyone".
The article says: "A university student from China has been arrested for illegally engaging in business activities outside the restrictions of his student visa, police said." Arrested, not deported.
Of course it's an English summary of a Japanese original. Does anyone here read Japanese well enough to check the original source?
About the discrepancy in the money amounts mentioned in another reply: 6 million yen is what the student has admitted. That's nowhere near $1 million. Police suspect his total profit is 100 million yen, which is near enough $1 million.
Patents used to be valid for 20 years from date of filing, now a company can sit on it, tweek it, and get 17 years from date of issue (AFIK).
It's the other way round: Patents used to be valid for 17 years from date of issue (allowing 'submarine' patents). Since 1995, they are valid for 20 years from date of filing.
That's a broad summary of the situation; for the details see a law site, e.g. here.
For 40 years, NASA has been sending astronauts into low Earth orbit and calling it "spaceflight". Dinking around in LEO is not space travel.
OK, there was the Apollo program. That begins to count. But the Apollo astronauts were still, at all times, within the Earth's gravity well (the moon is gravitationally bound to the Earth).
But now ...
"That kind of early demonstration mission might last no more than 60 or 90 days," Durda said, "and take the crew no farther than a few lunar distances away from Earth."
Finally. A human being is going to travel in space. Not very far. But it's a start, after decades of pitiful pretence.
Is organization not a talent? People skills aren't easy to master.
No, it's not; and yes, they are. I was a software developer, and became a manager. I was seen as a very good manager. I found the job pretty boring - I could do the work in about 20 hours/week (after all, the key skill is delegating as much as possible). In the end, I went back to software development, mainly because I found it more satisfying.
Of course I could have got a lot more money by working my way up the hierarchy, but not having been brought up in the USA, I don't regard accumulating/spending money as the purpose of life. I have enough money for my needs and my wife's.
The original article points out that keeping logs is incompatible with existing German law. But the law will soon be changed, because Germany will have to comply with an EU directive mandating that logs be kept for at least 6 months. Germany has already asked for an extension of the deadline to comply with this, but the strong likelihood is that the German privacy laws will be changed to comply with the EU-mandated snooping.
EU pols and bureaucrats are as hostile to personal privacy as US pols and bureaucrats.
So they have to believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show.
The media nowadays will publish whatever sells more advertising. That means: whatever sounds most sensational. Forecasting climate catastrophe sounds pretty sensational. It attracts more readers, generates more controversy, and (most important!) sells more advertising. So the media will go for it.
You not only don't have to "believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show"; you're an idiot if you do.
You can look at the prediction track record of the people who are quoted. And understanding Monckton's criticisms is not rocket science. He says the graphs produced by the global-warming doomsayers in 2001 suppress the medieval warm period. By golly, he's right. The graph makes it look as though the current warming is exceptional, but it isn't. Fluctuations happen. The warming between 1000 and about 1400 AD was more than the current warming, and it's mentioned in many historical sources (e.g. Wikipedia) and has been confirmed by many studies. You don't need calculus to understand stuff like this.
It is prudent to be alert to risks of changing the climate. Modest measures to reduce our gross waste of fossil fuels would be sensible. For example, if the US raised its gasoline taxes to European levels, Americans might be less inclined to buy SUVs. But extreme and costly measures seem foolish.
If there are 2 proposed solutions to a problem - one boring and sensible (e.g. "let's stop wasting so much energy") and one that sounds as though it's the brainchild of a 12-year-old on crack - the media will emphasize the second one.
The goal of today's journalist isn't to inform; it's to attract attention and get a response. Because that's what pleases the advertisers, who are the customers who count.
Well, let's see. Iran has not attacked any other nation, except in direct response to being attacked (by Iraq in 1980), for about the last thousand years. Doesn't seem like much of a threat to me.
On the other hand, there's a country much bigger than Iran which seems to bomb or invade a different country every 3 or 4 years ... Panama, Grenada, Libya, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq just since 1980, and I've probably missed a couple. I think it might be a good idea to have a deterrent to being attacked by that country, don't you?
Another thing: in return for licensing Novell to use its patents, Microsoft will get paid a small "tax" on certain sales by Novell. So that when somebody buys Novell Linux with a support contract, they're also paying Microsoft, which uses part of its revenue to try to destroy or cripple Linux.
Novell, and its legal team, has clearly calculated that it can simply screw all the people who wrote the software that Novell bundles and sells in its distro. Novell has enough good lawyers, and it's probably right.
For what it is worth, though, I shall make damn sure that anybody who asks me for advice about Linux is steered away from Novell.
I live in the EU, there are no software patents in my country an there won't be any in the future
My friend and fellow European, I sincerely hope you are right.
But I fear you are wrong. In fact, the more people think (like you) that there is no threat, the more likely it is that the megacorporations will win. They want software patents, to strangle small competitors before they can grow. They will not rest until they have software patents. The politicians won't help much - many of them are in the pockets of the megacorps anyway. To keep Europe free of software patents will require an ongoing effort by a lot of volunteers for many years.
but is Flash really required for this? Couldn't it be done another way?
No, Flash is not really required. It could all have been done with Javascript and images, plus possibly image maps.
I imagine that clicking is easier to manage than careful mouse manipulation for people with disabilities.
I'm not disabled, but I'm getting on a bit, (age > 60) and I find clicking a bit troublesome. (Double-clicking is really troublesome, I can't imagine why anyone ever thought that double-clicking was a good idea.) Remember that the sensitivity of mouse movement is adjustable in most GUIs, so pointer manipulation is unlikely to be a problem for anyone.
Hardware virtualization, as recently introduced by Intel and AMD, is very powerful technology. It's my personal opinion that this technology has been introduced a little bit too early
Virtualization was used in commercial machines as long ago as the early 1970s - IBM's VM/370 product was announced in 1972. The amount of hardware assistance for the virtualization depended on the 370 model. But this was the same kind of virtualization as recently introduced by Intel. You could run multiple different IBM operating systems under VM/370, and you could even run VM/370 under VM/370.
Since when are Peace Prizes given out to people who invent phyological/sonic/whateveryouwanttocallit weapons?
If the teenager-repellent were designed to exterminate teenagers, you'd have a point. But it isn't. It's just designed to persuade them to go somewhere where they don't annoy people. It's not a weapon of any kind.
You do understand the difference between insecticide and mosquito repellent, don't you?
the teenagers who hang around on the street either - they don't have anywhere else to go.
Translation: they're too stupid or unimaginative to think of anywhere else to go, or anything to do except "hang around on the street".
Fund/find an alternative, and you will see Amazon fix itself.
A major point of the article is that this is not possible because of the network effect - people who want to buy a book online go to Amazon, because Amazon has all the books and "just works".
As the article puts it:
As an academic, I am very interested in network effects - the curious economic features of networks, which increase in value as they increase in size. Does this mean that customers will be "locked in" to the system that achieves ubiquity? (...) Does this threaten the efficiency that the networked economy was supposed to provide? As a vendor, I fume and rant, but am unable to convince myself that we can shift distributors: will the people who want our books trust an unfamiliar name?
The education is being with people as smart as you, as young as you.
For me, the most educational thing about college was being with people smarter than me. I went to a small obscure high school, where I was easily the smartest kid around, and got into a top-notch college. I found out that I wasn't as bright as I'd thought I was.
Different people get different things out of college. Perhaps most of us are not qualified to judge what a person brighter than us gets out of it. Having read your remarks, I'm pretty sure that you're not qualified to judge Mr Banh's needs.
Traditional code reviews tend to be frustrating for the programmers, because the reviewers are in position of authority.
That's because most organizations don't know how to run code reviews properly.
For example, the reviewers should not be in a position of authority. Their role is to raise issues with the code. How to resolve those issues is entirely at the discretion of the programmer. Whether an issue requires any action at all is the programmer's decision.
Most programmers want to do excellent work, and will use the comments from the review to improve their code. If you have a programmer who does not want to do excellent work, the whole exercise is pointless - but if you have a programmer who does not want to do excellent work, you are in trouble in any case.