Nope, Ripple is only susceptible to something MUCH stupider.
The whole bitcoin craze was quite pointless IMHO, but at least they thought they were solving some problem...namely eliminating the need to trust in a government fiat currency and banking system and it's inherent downsides (inflation, stability, vulnerability to government confiscation, bank failure which is only partially mitigated by FDIC for people with large balances, etc).
But now with Ripple, the whole design is founded on having trust in a "bank" who holds your value. If that bank is deemed not trustworthy, then your dollar equivalent worth of Ripples isn't even equivalent to a dollar anymore. Thus we have the downsides of a banking system, without the benefit of FDIC to insure your value, government regulation to keep the Ripple banks accountable, or the decades of actual use to help expose the flaws in the system.
So no, you aren't vulnerable to 51% attacks, just single-entity attacks. Yeah, so much better.
Yes, unlike later games like Quake, where all level design were much more freeform from a data-structure point of view, Descent was much more restrictive. Like Doom, which only allowed 2-D convex empty rooms with varying heights for the floor and ceiling but could simulate more complex rooms by joining multiple such rooms together with transparent sides, Descent only only allowed hexahedron (ie: deformed cube) rooms, and you needed to join multiple such "rooms" together to create more complex room shapes.
Yes, Git is sort of like a blockchain. However, you most certainly CAN change a git history. I've done it before when I realized I accidentally committed 2 things together that should have been separate commits and then pushed them. All you have to do it go back to the spot in the history you want to modify, make the modification, and then successively rewrite everything that came after it. What happens then is that you simply fork the GIT repository. One fork has the original history, and the other fork has the rewritten history. However, the same thing is true of blockchain. You most certainly CAN rewrite the blockchin...you just have to rewrite everything that came after the modification.
The trick is how you deal with the fork. In a GIT repository, if you grabbed my old history before I rewrote it, then we can no longer share our commits with each other (short of simply cherry picking patches 1-by-1 off the other branch, which is essentially a manual merge of the forks). For this reason, I only do this sort of GIT history rewrite when I know there is nobody else involved. It's never on a publicly shared repository....only a private one where I know none of my coworkers have been working on that project recently.
But in theory, if one of my coworkers DID grab the old copy of the GIT history, then in order for us to become productive we'd have to come to an agreement on which history to use going forward. Either I say "forget it, lets just ignore my history rewrite", or he accepts my history and then cherry-picks/rewrites his commits to work against the new history. Of course that's only when there is 2 of us. If 100 people had grabbed the repository and made changes against it, then the solution becomes obvious...we CANNOT accept my rewritten history, and I'm overruled by my 100 coworkers.
And THIS is where we come to the ONLY thing that blockchain offers...how do we come to an agreement when not everyone agrees (ie: when the history has been forked). In the case of my GIT repository fork, we either manually resolve the 2 branches, or in the case of 100 coworkers I just accept majority rule and continue working off of their fork containing my unmodified history. Blockchain's ONLY contribution here is in algorithmically defining how we automatically all come to an agreement over time, and then particular blockchain implementations define (via proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, proof-of-storage, etc) how we ensure that one person can't pretend to be infinite people, thus manufacturing their own "majority" to stuff the ballot box and force their particular fork on everyone else.
Of course you can have it another way...you can have a central controller who is always the authority on what is the real history. An example of this is where you need to customize the code in a public GIT repository, but for one reason or another cannot push your code back into the GIT repository (either your changes must be kept secret, or the repository maintainer doesn't want to accept your changes). In that case, the person maintaining the repository is ALWAYS the authority. You can customize it to your hearts content, but nobody else using the repository has to care about your changes, and every time he releases an update, you are responsible for figuring out how you resolve the differences in your own copy of the code.
In the case of this central authority, blockchain offers NOTHING of value. We've already picked the algorithm for resolving multiple forks....we all trust and accept the central authority's decision and make his version official. In theory, he could always go back and rewrite his history...make a modification to a commit years ago and then rewrite the entire chain of modifications after that. He would then force his rewrite upon everyone else and they'd just have to accept it.
This sort of thing tends not to happen, because one possible outcome is that the masses agree he is no longer the central authority to be trusted. However, there are cases where this would happen. Think of a governme
I'm not sure why this is being discussed. It makes absolutely no difference how many spaces you put after a period. See, that was one space. That was 2 spaces and it looks exactly the same. This time I used 3 spaces. That was 8 spaces, and here comes 13. Could you tell the difference? I didn't think so.
It could possibly be a good idea in theory, but only in theory. Every one of those things you listed has edge cases and/or difference of opinion. Who decides what harassment is? At 2 am even the tiniest sound can wake people who are light sleepers. I'm not into sports at all, but what if I buy a TV on superbowl weekend because of the sales but discover it has some serious usability bugs that could never be observed in a store display?
But most important of all I think is the opportunity for abuse. Have a Hillary (or Trump) sticker on your car? Look at that, your tail light is out. Hey, you just did 1mph over the limit. Your bumper went an inch over the stop line at the red light. But swap one sticker for the other and you could see the cops looking the other way for a 10mph-over infraction. You already have police displaying that sort of discriminatory discretion, but when even more is on the line...the opportunity to remove your political opponents from the voting pool...you can expect it to be much worse.
The news organizations, both small and large, have thrown aside their objectivity and their bias's when writing and publishing their stories.
They've done what? Objective literally means without bias. So the news organizations have thrown aside both their bias and their lack of bias? How exactly does that work? Their stories are neither fact nor opinion, so what exactly are they?
You aren't making the distinction between merchandise/services and debt. When you go to the grocery store and the store refuses to accept your cash, then you simply walk out without your merchandise and the store keeps your merchandise for the next customer. With the typical restaurant model, when you eat your food and then pay at the end, you have created a debt. If the restaurant refuses your cash payment, you can't walk out of there without the food (at least not in a way that would allow them to serve it to the next customer). In that case, you have created a debt. If the restaurant refused your cash payment, then you could very well walk out not owing anything, regardless of any signs they may have posted.
Of course, the way for the restaurant to deal with this is to simply have the customer pay up front. You order your food, pay at that time. Then they cook the order and serve your food. At the end they can bring your your receipt for you to write in your tip (I'd be curious if the cashless restaurant would refuse a cash tip). If you want to add to your order, I'm unsure if the system allows them to charge more than the additional authorized amount. Behind the scenes, I don't know how the auth/payment mechanisms work. Clearly a restaurant can add in the tip as they currently do. I'm not sure if that mechanism is designed purely for tips (and thus they would have to lie and say the additional amount was a tip instead of extra food) or if it can be used to add additional food. Of course the could also take the gas station method of authorizing a higher amount up front and then adjusting to your actual purchase amount.
Wow, so you really couldn't tell that the "when were they supposed to load test" post was a joke? I thought it was pretty fucking obvious, yet there you are responding with a serious rebuttal.
Speaking of which, your rebuttal was essentially to say it's a good thing people like me weren't in charge of the IRS. So going back to my first post, clearly you must not understand what the phrase "there's a part of me" means. You must be under the mistaken impression it means "defy all logic and reason and let my personal pet peeve dictated our course of action". In that context your reply makes sense. However, for those of us who know what the phrase really means, your post makes little sense. Essentially you said it's a good thing that the IRS isn't being run by people who would have made the exact same decision as the people actually running the IRS.
When were they supposed to load test their servers? They had to keep them up and running so that everyone who didn't procrastinate was able to pay their taxes.
I totally understand why the IRS is extending the deadline. It's just good customer service (which they don't necessarily have a reputation for). I'm sure it saves a lot of effort to just wait and receive electronic payment vs having to physically handle the paper checks in the mail. And lord knows nobody at the IRS wants to inadvertently make eye contact with the Orange God, lest they become his newest weapon of mass distraction.
That said, I spent too many years working in the college computer lab dealing with procrastinating students freaking out because the printer was broken or the network was down. "What do you mean? Can't you fix it? I have a paper that's due in 10 minutes!!!!!!!!!!!! I need you to write me a note for my professor". There's a part of me that really wants the IRS to just say "well what have you been doing the last two and a half months?"
It is not oversensationalizing, it is risk vs reward. They aren't allowed on commercial airlines, too risky. LiON batteries have been forbidden on US submarines for YEARS, well before the Galaxy S series premiered.
Not allowed on commercial airlines? Since when? That's news to me. It also appears to be news to the FAA, so you might want to give them a heads up: https://www.faa.gov/about/init...
Can it be tested technically? I would think that someone on Android at this point would have created some low-level way to monitor microphone use (not just "microphone accessed" but actually seeing data come from it) and would have caught Facebook monitoring the microphone.
I feel like there should be some way to check Facebook's access of the microphone at the hardware level.
It would be a piece of cake for anyone on Cyanogen/Lineage to test. Privacy Guard can be set to prompt you any time the app tries to use the microphone. It also keeps a log of how many times and the last time access was granted. I'd test it out myself, but no facebook account here.
Honestly, I suspect all these claims of "I never search, but then I said it and started seeing ads" have another explanation. Perhaps you did search for it and don't recall. Random chance (show enough people enough different ads and someone somewhere is going to experience a suspicious coincidence). Perhaps a spouse or friend went and searched for it shortly after you discussed it (remember, facebook can definitely detect 2 people in close proximity, so when one person searches for something new, show the ad to people who were nearby in the previous day). Perhaps you previously saw the ad without realizing it, it subconsciously stuck in your mind, and that's why you ended up discussing it. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to explain it using techniques we already know for a fact that they utilize. No need to invoke any conspiracy theories.
You expect them to come up with that solution? I'm pretty sure that's beyond their problem solving ability. I mean, just look at this bit from the article:
The sudden influx of 911 calls last fall led to a minor crisis at Elk Grove's police department......In an email to Elk Grove dispatchers on February 21, an Elk Grove manager said she'd had weekly conference calls with Apple's global security division and had narrowed it down to an issue with "iPhone 8, 8 Plus, X and the Apple Watch."
So wait... This problem started suddenly last fall, and then 3+ month later they've merely narrowed it down to one of the new products that they launched last fall? Great sleuthing there, Apple. Maybe in a couple more months you can narrow it down to something even more specific, like "the issue is that the device is doing something that it's not supposed to be doing".
Don't hold your breath for a resolution on this one, folks.
Based on the video I saw, she was practically invisible until she entered the car's headlight beams. The road was poorly lit, and she had dark clothing, no reflectors on the bike and no lights.
I don't see how I could have stopped or swerved in time to avoid her in that brief window.
Then I suggest you try driving by looking out the windshield, and not at a crappy video of whats in front of you. I say that not as a joke. People seem to keep judging this situation by the video we see, but the video quality is pretty much crap. I guarantee the human eye would capture much better detail (both in terms of resolution as well as shadow detail) then what we see in that video. The video is absolute crap, so please don't say what you couldn't have done based on it.
While you are technically correct, the question still does raise an interesting point.
The network is designed to favor the longest chain. Yet sometimes the longest chain loses. Two miners are working on block n. Miner A completes block n. A while later, miner B (who either didn't get the message about miner A, or decided maliciously to ignore it) mines block n, then gets lucky and mines block n+1. Assuming miner B's block goes on to become the official new chain, then miner A never technically mined any of those block successfully, and all those transaction are invalid (even though they were confirmed initially).
This doesn't happen often, but it does happen from time to time. Yet with every block ahead one version of the chain gets, it makes it increasingly more unlikely for the other chain to catch up (unless the other controls a majority of the hashing power). That's why the generally accepted system is that a block is mined every 10 minutes, but a transaction isn't generally considered completely verified until 6 block (1 hour) later. By the time that 6 additional blocks have been mined, it is statistically extremely unlikely for the other chain to catch up.
Yet, in the proposed theoretical scenario, what you have is 2 different fractions of the network cut off from each other. Both are working with the best of intentions, and after several hours have passed, certainly everyone would have expected the completed transactions in each half to be set in stone. Yet when the 2 parts of the network are rejoined, the result is that one of the parts is going to have all of its transactions invalidated.
So yes, the protocol handles the scenario perfectly, but that is little consolation to anyone who honestly thought the transactions were final and thus released physical goods. Now they have neither the goods nor the bitcoin to show for it.
I think you are the one being lied to, and not by the AC above you but by your insurer. When ACA was enacted, my employer provided coverage was very good, but not fully compliant either. Nope, it too had some nitpick detail that the plan didn't cover something. Specifically, it did not provide free preventative care visits, or free birth control.
It really sucked when my plan was cancelled because of that. Oh wait, I forgot...it wasn't cancelled. The next time the plan renewed annually, they added an additional rider to the policy (every policy has tons of those) which provided those services at no cost. There was nothing stopping your insurer from slightly altering the coverage terms to make it compliant. They just didn't want to. Why? Most likely they saw it as a chance to jack up rates and pad their profits while saying "sorry, wasn't us....Obamacare".
You don't even need to do online purchases. After 2 years, the chips on 2 of my cards are so flaky that they often don't work. It works every now an then, but usually it ends up telling me to reinsert the card, then after the 3rd failed chip read it tells me just to swipe it. Never once has a cashier given it a second though and asked to see the card or ID. They just act like it's routine (which wouldn't surprise me if it were). So really all they need to do is clone your card onto a card with an intentionally defective chip and they're back in business as usual
Yeah, this should not be about a corporate competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society. I'm trying to think of an analogy. The best I can think of is if a city gets a new major or police chief, and that person manages to drastically reduce crime in their city. Should they keep their crime prevention techniques private so their city can have a competitive advantage over other nearby cities, thus drawing more people to want to live/work/shop there? No, because this isn't really a zero sum game. Its a game where everyone can win simultaneously. Likewise, diversity is not supposed to be about competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society and the fair treatment of all people.
Yes, google thought about it a while ago. That's the reason why Android Oreo introduced project treble. The reason the vast majority of smartphones never get updates is because each update requires vendor customization for each piece of hardware. Project treble has split apart the hardware support layer from the main OS layer. Going forward, the vendors only need to create the initial implementation of the hardware layer, and then each time a new version of Android is released it can be laid over top the old hardware layer with no rework necessary. Updates to the hardware layer are only necessary when there is a bug there, which of course is still a concern, but that's not where the vast majority of bugs are found these days.
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Nope, Ripple is only susceptible to something MUCH stupider.
The whole bitcoin craze was quite pointless IMHO, but at least they thought they were solving some problem...namely eliminating the need to trust in a government fiat currency and banking system and it's inherent downsides (inflation, stability, vulnerability to government confiscation, bank failure which is only partially mitigated by FDIC for people with large balances, etc).
But now with Ripple, the whole design is founded on having trust in a "bank" who holds your value. If that bank is deemed not trustworthy, then your dollar equivalent worth of Ripples isn't even equivalent to a dollar anymore. Thus we have the downsides of a banking system, without the benefit of FDIC to insure your value, government regulation to keep the Ripple banks accountable, or the decades of actual use to help expose the flaws in the system.
So no, you aren't vulnerable to 51% attacks, just single-entity attacks. Yeah, so much better.
Yes, unlike later games like Quake, where all level design were much more freeform from a data-structure point of view, Descent was much more restrictive. Like Doom, which only allowed 2-D convex empty rooms with varying heights for the floor and ceiling but could simulate more complex rooms by joining multiple such rooms together with transparent sides, Descent only only allowed hexahedron (ie: deformed cube) rooms, and you needed to join multiple such "rooms" together to create more complex room shapes.
Yes, Git is sort of like a blockchain. However, you most certainly CAN change a git history. I've done it before when I realized I accidentally committed 2 things together that should have been separate commits and then pushed them. All you have to do it go back to the spot in the history you want to modify, make the modification, and then successively rewrite everything that came after it. What happens then is that you simply fork the GIT repository. One fork has the original history, and the other fork has the rewritten history. However, the same thing is true of blockchain. You most certainly CAN rewrite the blockchin...you just have to rewrite everything that came after the modification.
The trick is how you deal with the fork. In a GIT repository, if you grabbed my old history before I rewrote it, then we can no longer share our commits with each other (short of simply cherry picking patches 1-by-1 off the other branch, which is essentially a manual merge of the forks). For this reason, I only do this sort of GIT history rewrite when I know there is nobody else involved. It's never on a publicly shared repository....only a private one where I know none of my coworkers have been working on that project recently.
But in theory, if one of my coworkers DID grab the old copy of the GIT history, then in order for us to become productive we'd have to come to an agreement on which history to use going forward. Either I say "forget it, lets just ignore my history rewrite", or he accepts my history and then cherry-picks/rewrites his commits to work against the new history. Of course that's only when there is 2 of us. If 100 people had grabbed the repository and made changes against it, then the solution becomes obvious...we CANNOT accept my rewritten history, and I'm overruled by my 100 coworkers.
And THIS is where we come to the ONLY thing that blockchain offers...how do we come to an agreement when not everyone agrees (ie: when the history has been forked). In the case of my GIT repository fork, we either manually resolve the 2 branches, or in the case of 100 coworkers I just accept majority rule and continue working off of their fork containing my unmodified history. Blockchain's ONLY contribution here is in algorithmically defining how we automatically all come to an agreement over time, and then particular blockchain implementations define (via proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, proof-of-storage, etc) how we ensure that one person can't pretend to be infinite people, thus manufacturing their own "majority" to stuff the ballot box and force their particular fork on everyone else.
Of course you can have it another way...you can have a central controller who is always the authority on what is the real history. An example of this is where you need to customize the code in a public GIT repository, but for one reason or another cannot push your code back into the GIT repository (either your changes must be kept secret, or the repository maintainer doesn't want to accept your changes). In that case, the person maintaining the repository is ALWAYS the authority. You can customize it to your hearts content, but nobody else using the repository has to care about your changes, and every time he releases an update, you are responsible for figuring out how you resolve the differences in your own copy of the code.
In the case of this central authority, blockchain offers NOTHING of value. We've already picked the algorithm for resolving multiple forks....we all trust and accept the central authority's decision and make his version official. In theory, he could always go back and rewrite his history...make a modification to a commit years ago and then rewrite the entire chain of modifications after that. He would then force his rewrite upon everyone else and they'd just have to accept it.
This sort of thing tends not to happen, because one possible outcome is that the masses agree he is no longer the central authority to be trusted. However, there are cases where this would happen. Think of a governme
I'm not sure why this is being discussed. It makes absolutely no difference how many spaces you put after a period. See, that was one space. That was 2 spaces and it looks exactly the same. This time I used 3 spaces. That was 8 spaces, and here comes 13. Could you tell the difference? I didn't think so.
It could possibly be a good idea in theory, but only in theory. Every one of those things you listed has edge cases and/or difference of opinion. Who decides what harassment is? At 2 am even the tiniest sound can wake people who are light sleepers. I'm not into sports at all, but what if I buy a TV on superbowl weekend because of the sales but discover it has some serious usability bugs that could never be observed in a store display?
But most important of all I think is the opportunity for abuse. Have a Hillary (or Trump) sticker on your car? Look at that, your tail light is out. Hey, you just did 1mph over the limit. Your bumper went an inch over the stop line at the red light. But swap one sticker for the other and you could see the cops looking the other way for a 10mph-over infraction. You already have police displaying that sort of discriminatory discretion, but when even more is on the line...the opportunity to remove your political opponents from the voting pool...you can expect it to be much worse.
The news organizations, both small and large, have thrown aside their objectivity and their bias's when writing and publishing their stories.
They've done what? Objective literally means without bias. So the news organizations have thrown aside both their bias and their lack of bias? How exactly does that work? Their stories are neither fact nor opinion, so what exactly are they?
You aren't making the distinction between merchandise/services and debt. When you go to the grocery store and the store refuses to accept your cash, then you simply walk out without your merchandise and the store keeps your merchandise for the next customer. With the typical restaurant model, when you eat your food and then pay at the end, you have created a debt. If the restaurant refuses your cash payment, you can't walk out of there without the food (at least not in a way that would allow them to serve it to the next customer). In that case, you have created a debt. If the restaurant refused your cash payment, then you could very well walk out not owing anything, regardless of any signs they may have posted.
Of course, the way for the restaurant to deal with this is to simply have the customer pay up front. You order your food, pay at that time. Then they cook the order and serve your food. At the end they can bring your your receipt for you to write in your tip (I'd be curious if the cashless restaurant would refuse a cash tip). If you want to add to your order, I'm unsure if the system allows them to charge more than the additional authorized amount. Behind the scenes, I don't know how the auth/payment mechanisms work. Clearly a restaurant can add in the tip as they currently do. I'm not sure if that mechanism is designed purely for tips (and thus they would have to lie and say the additional amount was a tip instead of extra food) or if it can be used to add additional food. Of course the could also take the gas station method of authorizing a higher amount up front and then adjusting to your actual purchase amount.
Wow, so you really couldn't tell that the "when were they supposed to load test" post was a joke? I thought it was pretty fucking obvious, yet there you are responding with a serious rebuttal.
Speaking of which, your rebuttal was essentially to say it's a good thing people like me weren't in charge of the IRS. So going back to my first post, clearly you must not understand what the phrase "there's a part of me" means. You must be under the mistaken impression it means "defy all logic and reason and let my personal pet peeve dictated our course of action". In that context your reply makes sense. However, for those of us who know what the phrase really means, your post makes little sense. Essentially you said it's a good thing that the IRS isn't being run by people who would have made the exact same decision as the people actually running the IRS.
I love how some people believe that jokes are serious.
When were they supposed to load test their servers? They had to keep them up and running so that everyone who didn't procrastinate was able to pay their taxes.
You messed it up:
https://youtu.be/ZnJcZ-5P8hE?t...
It really makes no difference to him. Debts discharged in bankruptcy are not taxable income, so he's got nothing to report and nothing due.
I totally understand why the IRS is extending the deadline. It's just good customer service (which they don't necessarily have a reputation for). I'm sure it saves a lot of effort to just wait and receive electronic payment vs having to physically handle the paper checks in the mail. And lord knows nobody at the IRS wants to inadvertently make eye contact with the Orange God, lest they become his newest weapon of mass distraction.
That said, I spent too many years working in the college computer lab dealing with procrastinating students freaking out because the printer was broken or the network was down. "What do you mean? Can't you fix it? I have a paper that's due in 10 minutes!!!!!!!!!!!! I need you to write me a note for my professor". There's a part of me that really wants the IRS to just say "well what have you been doing the last two and a half months?"
It is not oversensationalizing, it is risk vs reward. They aren't allowed on commercial airlines, too risky. LiON batteries have been forbidden on US submarines for YEARS, well before the Galaxy S series premiered.
Not allowed on commercial airlines? Since when? That's news to me. It also appears to be news to the FAA, so you might want to give them a heads up: https://www.faa.gov/about/init...
Can it be tested technically? I would think that someone on Android at this point would have created some low-level way to monitor microphone use (not just "microphone accessed" but actually seeing data come from it) and would have caught Facebook monitoring the microphone.
I feel like there should be some way to check Facebook's access of the microphone at the hardware level.
It would be a piece of cake for anyone on Cyanogen/Lineage to test. Privacy Guard can be set to prompt you any time the app tries to use the microphone. It also keeps a log of how many times and the last time access was granted. I'd test it out myself, but no facebook account here.
Honestly, I suspect all these claims of "I never search, but then I said it and started seeing ads" have another explanation. Perhaps you did search for it and don't recall. Random chance (show enough people enough different ads and someone somewhere is going to experience a suspicious coincidence). Perhaps a spouse or friend went and searched for it shortly after you discussed it (remember, facebook can definitely detect 2 people in close proximity, so when one person searches for something new, show the ad to people who were nearby in the previous day). Perhaps you previously saw the ad without realizing it, it subconsciously stuck in your mind, and that's why you ended up discussing it. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to explain it using techniques we already know for a fact that they utilize. No need to invoke any conspiracy theories.
You expect them to come up with that solution? I'm pretty sure that's beyond their problem solving ability. I mean, just look at this bit from the article:
The sudden influx of 911 calls last fall led to a minor crisis at Elk Grove's police department......In an email to Elk Grove dispatchers on February 21, an Elk Grove manager said she'd had weekly conference calls with Apple's global security division and had narrowed it down to an issue with "iPhone 8, 8 Plus, X and the Apple Watch."
So wait... This problem started suddenly last fall, and then 3+ month later they've merely narrowed it down to one of the new products that they launched last fall? Great sleuthing there, Apple. Maybe in a couple more months you can narrow it down to something even more specific, like "the issue is that the device is doing something that it's not supposed to be doing".
Don't hold your breath for a resolution on this one, folks.
Apple has that many defective "new in box" phones? What kind of shit manufacturing is that?
Based on the video I saw, she was practically invisible until she entered the car's headlight beams. The road was poorly lit, and she had dark clothing, no reflectors on the bike and no lights.
I don't see how I could have stopped or swerved in time to avoid her in that brief window.
Then I suggest you try driving by looking out the windshield, and not at a crappy video of whats in front of you. I say that not as a joke. People seem to keep judging this situation by the video we see, but the video quality is pretty much crap. I guarantee the human eye would capture much better detail (both in terms of resolution as well as shadow detail) then what we see in that video. The video is absolute crap, so please don't say what you couldn't have done based on it.
While you are technically correct, the question still does raise an interesting point.
The network is designed to favor the longest chain. Yet sometimes the longest chain loses. Two miners are working on block n. Miner A completes block n. A while later, miner B (who either didn't get the message about miner A, or decided maliciously to ignore it) mines block n, then gets lucky and mines block n+1. Assuming miner B's block goes on to become the official new chain, then miner A never technically mined any of those block successfully, and all those transaction are invalid (even though they were confirmed initially).
This doesn't happen often, but it does happen from time to time. Yet with every block ahead one version of the chain gets, it makes it increasingly more unlikely for the other chain to catch up (unless the other controls a majority of the hashing power). That's why the generally accepted system is that a block is mined every 10 minutes, but a transaction isn't generally considered completely verified until 6 block (1 hour) later. By the time that 6 additional blocks have been mined, it is statistically extremely unlikely for the other chain to catch up.
Yet, in the proposed theoretical scenario, what you have is 2 different fractions of the network cut off from each other. Both are working with the best of intentions, and after several hours have passed, certainly everyone would have expected the completed transactions in each half to be set in stone. Yet when the 2 parts of the network are rejoined, the result is that one of the parts is going to have all of its transactions invalidated.
So yes, the protocol handles the scenario perfectly, but that is little consolation to anyone who honestly thought the transactions were final and thus released physical goods. Now they have neither the goods nor the bitcoin to show for it.
Most keyboards only go up to 10.
God damn it, why the fuck didn't someone tell me this earlier? Apparently I've spent my entire life using substandard keyboards that only go up to 9.
It didn't even need to be redacted. This is slashdot. We don't support Unicode here.
I think you are the one being lied to, and not by the AC above you but by your insurer. When ACA was enacted, my employer provided coverage was very good, but not fully compliant either. Nope, it too had some nitpick detail that the plan didn't cover something. Specifically, it did not provide free preventative care visits, or free birth control.
It really sucked when my plan was cancelled because of that. Oh wait, I forgot...it wasn't cancelled. The next time the plan renewed annually, they added an additional rider to the policy (every policy has tons of those) which provided those services at no cost. There was nothing stopping your insurer from slightly altering the coverage terms to make it compliant. They just didn't want to. Why? Most likely they saw it as a chance to jack up rates and pad their profits while saying "sorry, wasn't us....Obamacare".
You don't even need to do online purchases. After 2 years, the chips on 2 of my cards are so flaky that they often don't work. It works every now an then, but usually it ends up telling me to reinsert the card, then after the 3rd failed chip read it tells me just to swipe it. Never once has a cashier given it a second though and asked to see the card or ID. They just act like it's routine (which wouldn't surprise me if it were). So really all they need to do is clone your card onto a card with an intentionally defective chip and they're back in business as usual
Yeah, this should not be about a corporate competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society. I'm trying to think of an analogy. The best I can think of is if a city gets a new major or police chief, and that person manages to drastically reduce crime in their city. Should they keep their crime prevention techniques private so their city can have a competitive advantage over other nearby cities, thus drawing more people to want to live/work/shop there? No, because this isn't really a zero sum game. Its a game where everyone can win simultaneously. Likewise, diversity is not supposed to be about competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society and the fair treatment of all people.
Yes, google thought about it a while ago. That's the reason why Android Oreo introduced project treble. The reason the vast majority of smartphones never get updates is because each update requires vendor customization for each piece of hardware. Project treble has split apart the hardware support layer from the main OS layer. Going forward, the vendors only need to create the initial implementation of the hardware layer, and then each time a new version of Android is released it can be laid over top the old hardware layer with no rework necessary. Updates to the hardware layer are only necessary when there is a bug there, which of course is still a concern, but that's not where the vast majority of bugs are found these days.