The Swedes tried to do that. Most refugees destroy their documents so they can't be deported and Sweden gives preference to children. It turned out that most of the 'child refugees' they were admitting were over 18.
The Migration Agency has so far made 5,700 decisions on the basis of assessments carried out by Rättsmedicinalverket. In 79 percent of those cases the agency decided to formally consider the applicant as older than they had initially claimed in their asylum application, reports Svenska Dagbladet (SvD).
Between mid-March and late October, Rättsmedicinalverket carried out a total of 7,858 age assessments. Of those, it found that their examination suggested 6,628 were 18 or older, and 112 "possibly" 18 or older.
The left - who wanted to let in the refugees - claimed that doing tests were a violation of human rights of course and fought the introduction of them to the bitter end. You can expect something similar to happen in Germany.
Wrong, most of the claimed child refugees submitted for testing were adults. But they only tested a refuge when they thought they were lying. No one is going to bother doing an assessment of a 10 year old.
Further down in the same article: As a result, in September last year the government asked for medical age assessments to be carried out on a large scale.
More than 80,000 minors (of whom 37,000 arrived in the country without a parent or guardian) applied for asylum in Sweden in 2015 and 2016. Medical age assessments are carried out only in cases where the Migration Agency believes there is reason to doubt their age.
There's every reason to believe that a substantial majority of the child refugees are actually children.
I know that no one has found a true fix to the scaling issues, but newer coins have technical advances that alleviate them somewhat.
What's stopping the Bitcoin network from adopting one of them? Is it that hard to get them to agree on something? Do they just not recognize the problem?
That's garbage talk there... The oil companies suppressed nothing, they produced energy at the lowest possible cost is all.
What happened is fossil fuels remained cheaper than the alternative so the ROI wasn't there to justify alternate sources of energy. The market chooses the cheapest viable alternative. That was fossil fuels. The oil companies just delivered us what we where willing to pay for.
So, in your parlance and using your logic, the problem was regulation that didn't make fossil fuels more expensive... So government is the problem, if we use your logic.
Not that I agree, I think fossil fuels are a fine thing myself and has contributed mightily to the creation of wealth and increased standards of living world wide.
They're cheaper only if you don't count the externalized costs of the environment damage, costs that they deliberately hid.
There's two ways to deal with that.
The standard liberal approach is government regulation.
The standard libertarian approach is a lawsuit, which is exactly what NYC is doing.
And if they hadn't "covered it up" (going back to the 70's/80's, if I remember the claims correctly), what action would the cities have taken to mitigate the release of CO2?
Possibly nothing.
The point isn't that cities specifically would have done X if Oil Companies hadn't deceived them about climate change.
The point is the product produced by Oil Companies harms cities, and the Oil Companies covered up that harm.
IANAL and IANAJ, but I should think a logical requirement for the cities to prevail should be for the cities to demonstrate there is some reasonable action that they would have taken had this "fraud" not been committed.
IANAL either but the cities should only need to show that if not for the fraud then someone would have taken action to reduce the damages.
And that's a trivial bar to clear. Non-carbon energy sources were around for this entire period and would have received much more investment and development. The Kyoto protocol which would have reduced CO2 emissions, and damages, failed in large part because of the disinformation campaign from the Oil Industry.
Without the cover up we'd have much less CO2 in the atmosphere and thus fewer damages, both now and especially in the future, from global warming.
York City's five pension funds have about $5 billion in fossil fuel investments.
So if NYC wins, do they also have to take responsibility for being a a co-conspirator? They did help the oil companies by financing what they were doing with $5 billion in just the pension funds alone. What other investments do/did they have with oil and coal I wonder? How much fossil fuel was, and still is used by NYC? Are they going to shut down all of the ports that oil burning ships dock at? What about all of the freight by diesel truck and trains? How about all of the stock brokers on Wall Street that deal with investments in oil and coal? They should go after them too.
I'm all for being responsible for the environment, but this is just stupid.
I actually think it has a shot.
Not because the Oil Companies emitted fossil fuels in the past, or because they continue to emit them now, but because of the cover up.
I think the central claims would be: 1) Exxon Mobil, BP, etc all knew that global warming was real and that their product could incur major costs on coastal cities like NYC. 2) They conspired to cover up and mislead the public about #1.
If those two facts are true I think they do deserve to pay damages.
The only awkward bit is the fact that a class action lawsuit involving a major portion of the planet makes a lot more sense.
Note, I don't think smaller producers or manufactures would bear the same legal liability since even if they knowingly mislead the public their individual contributions would be too small to incur distinct damages.
If this passes a vote, then Net Neutrality lives to see another day.
If it doesn't pass, then those who voted against it will have declared themselves on the issue.
Either way it's time for them all to get off the fence.
If this passes a vote in the Senate then Paul Ryan can simply ignore it and it will never come up for a vote in the house (and congressional GOP members won't be on record as voting against it).
If Paul Ryan does schedule a vote, and it does pass congress, then Trump still has the option of vetoing it.
In fact, if they were being really devious, the Senate could pass the bill unanimously and the House could never schedule a vote. So NN is still dead and no one is on record as opposing it.
That being said I wouldn't assume there was foul play in this case, people do regularly kill themselves, even people whom other people have a good motive to kill.
And from the sounds of it he was no longer involved with the project, if you were going to try pressure someone in the hopes of uncovering a source, and then kill said someone to shut them up, he wouldn't really be the logical target.
How can it be possible that a big company like Western Digital constructs a backdoor to your personal data? Such a company - and it's owners - should shut down, prosecuted and put behind bars for many - many - years... This is not an accident. This is making sure by design they (and maybe their partners, workforce, ex-workforce and 3-letter agencies) have acces to your private data. I for one will never buy another device from Western. Who knows what they have done to the IC's in their harddisks to provide access to my data. I can not look into a chip and they know that!
It's a massive screwup, though we don't really know how it got there yet, a few quick scenarios are: 1) It could have been a deliberate backdoor for WD, the government, etc, that was sanctioned by the highest levels of the company, but this seems quite unlikely. 2) It could be a malicious employee (or even outside attacker) who introduced the backdoor for their own purposes. 3) An individual or team who didn't know any better put it there. 4) An individual or team added it for testing purposes, and people forget and never pulled it out.
My money would be on 3 or 4, reading the advisory from the security researcher it sounds like there was a lot of sloppiness in the WD code.
It sounds like it was inherited from another WD product that got patched in 2014 (but the patch was never ported to this device) so my money is on crappy software processes.
For those of us, like me, who were confused how Democrats could force a vote when bills could only be brought to the floor for a vote by the House Majority Leader. It turns out that the congressional review act specifically allows a vote to be schedule by 30 senators sponsoring a bill, bypassing the House Majority Leader.
Protected classes. Race and gender are protected classes everywhere in the US, and political affiliation (and activities) are a protected class in California.
I remember people claiming that DaMore was a liberal or democrat, but I guess that's clarified now.
He might have been. But then he got fired, became vilified by Progressive activists, and spent 4 months being courted by Conservative activists. I'm sure the plan now is to martyr him, get him on some cable news panels, and stick him on the Conservative speaking circuit.
I have no idea what his personal leanings are, nor how amendable he is to the plan as described, but this lawsuit certainly fits the script.
That is about 2% of VISA's network average, and Bitcoin Cash alone can scale up to ~11 million per day.
Those 5 currencies have the equivalent value of South Korea's M1 money supply.
So that's not as big a gap as I thought, but there's still the delay it takes for a transaction to go through, which in my understanding is restricted by the ability of the network to authenticate and agree on the transaction.
Is the assumption that retailers basically won't bother to wait and eat the fraud risk? Or that they'll still be using credit cards to do the transaction?
Nope, we as human creatures can't be trusted to have a public use anything, unless it's got a self-enforcement or monitoring mechanism which sort of defeats the whole idea.
I think the trouble is with all of these bike shares you're always going to have individuals who will try to push the limits of what's accepted. And if there's no consequence they'll keep pushing those limits those limits will become the new standard for what is accepted. And then people will then push the new standard as well.
Collective goods are possible, but you need some sort of re-enforcement, either positive or negative, to keep people acting responsibly. Otherwise you're relying on people to act responsibly when they see everyone else getting away with being a bad actor.
There are only so many people in the world smart enough to even fully understand modern superscalar designs let alone contribute usefully to it.
I doubt that's true.
The problem wasn't the lack of people smart enough to spot the bug, it was the fact the bug was created 20 years ago back when people probably weren't thinking about bugs like that. And then in the 20 years since there probably weren't many people with a reason to start digging into that level of the design.
I'm not sure open source would have made a big difference, it gives you more eyes in some cases, but as OpenSSL demonstrated people only read the code they change, so old code that "just works" tends not to get looked at too closely.
It's unreal how much anti crypto talk there is here. This used to be a site for nerds and now it's just frigging negative crabby assholes. Bitpay in the USA was not hurt by this it was the VISA partner in Europe that wasn't following rules. If it were a crack down on blockchain it'd be everywhere and every partner of VISA dealing with it.
Ok, so baring some breakthrough in technology describe to me the state of cryptocurrencies in 20 years.
Because right now they won't be currencies, nothing I've seen suggests they can scale to the necessary number of transactions.
And they won't be gold either. Right now some unknown relative could die, will me a house, and if I found a pile of gold inside I could turn that into currency.
There's a lot of people who can't access their own cryptocurrencies from 5 years ago.
In 20 years I can see cryptocurrencies hanging around as a form of blackmarket currency, but without something gamechanging I can't see them being anything else.
Seriously - anyone who knows enough should know that this bug (being able to read tiny amounts of kmem ONLY during a specific sequence of speculative instructions; bad but hardly an open port) requires: malware to already be running on your system (in which case you are already screwed);
So any remote exploit or a multi-user server with a hostile user.
"I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices."
Someone refusing to sell doesn't determine the price, someone willing to buy (or sell) does. If bitcoin devolves to the point where nobody who's got it is willing to sell, then it's really dead.
Ultimately yes. But the fewer people willing to sell the lower the supply for people who want to buy, and that will keep the price up.
I expect bitcoin to keep yo-yo-ing for a bit, there will be a lot of people getting back in hoping for it to hit $20k again, and they may be right. Since bitcoin is pure speculation there is no proper value, $100 was a bubble, as was $1000, as was $20k. I think the sheer amount of capital is going to limit another big jump, but if common sense didn't halt it previously why should it now?
Yeah, I assume a private network, or a network comprised of only certain parties (ie levels of government with the authority to modify the ledger).
As to the the advantage over a database, the blockchain is distributed and has a history of transactions for units (and a way to break up units) by design. Just like any tech you can do that stuff with a DB, but it might be more natural to pull off with a blockchain,
Cryptocurrencies may succeed, but Bitcoin has too many limitations in it that newer cryptocurrencies don't have.
Which ones? There was recently an article about Iota but it sounds like it has some serious technical flaws. As to newer blockchain cryptocurriencies, my understanding is they generally improve on bitcoin's technical issues, but they don't actually solve them. If they had one of them would have probably overtaken bitcoin.
I don't see it crashing below January 2017 levels any time soon, but it will be below $5000 by the end of the decade.
The one thing it does have is market dominance and relatively wide acceptance.
I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices. But at some point people will start wondering what bitcoin is actually supposed to be good for.
The future of cryptocurrencies will be in: 1) Bank/government/other-big-corporation-backed currencies
Wasn't the purpose of bitcoin to take the power away from banks and central governments?
2) A cryptocurrency that is what Bitcoin was in the beginning - a hard-to-track, very-low-transaction-cost currency that doesn't give people with special equipment a significant advantage.
The one thing that may hamper 2) is if mining is concentrated in one part of the world due to cheap energy. That can lead to cartels and loss of trust as a "nearly anonymous" medium of exchange.
The low transaction cost was due to its obscurity, the high transaction cost seems to be a fundamental feature of the blockchain and high throughput.
I was doing some research and some companies are trying to make it work as an inventory tracker.
Every time I see the tech in practice, it seems to be easily replaceable by a secure database, which appears to have all the features of blockchain except the supposed anonymity, and a secure database doesn't have problems like a 51% attack, nor the ridiculous time per transaction or cost per transaction problems.
Seems like blockchain so far is workable as a very expensive type of unregulated gambling.
There's a lot of places thinking about using the blockchain for land ledgers. The trouble with land ledgers is a lot of people and groups need access but it's really hard to keep track of and keep everything updated, especially in less developed countries. The blockchain solves this by making the information both widely accessible and trustworthy. Best part is land doesn't change hands much so you don't have the scalability issues of bitcoin.
The emergency dispatcher who didn't ask the right questions to determine if it was a prank is also somewhat negligent. The call was to the city hall, not 9-1-1, and described a different home than where the murder took place.
What sort questions? Is this a hoax? What's the name of your neighbourhood school?
Recall the 911 call came from an individual who had supposedly killed someone, was considering killing several more people, and was potentially having some kind of mental breakdown. And while we know it was a hoax know most calls like that are going to be legitimate.
Her only job was to keep him calm so he didn't finish off the rest of the family.
Ah yes, the "police officers have a dangerous job" excuse. You do realize that statistically speaking being a police officer doesn't even make the top 10 dangerous jobs in terms of risk to life and limb right?
You also realize that statistically speaking most of "being a police officer" involves driving around in a patrol car, sitting at a desk filling out reports, and performing traffic stops with people who are completely calm and behaving normally.
The absolute danger rate isn't relevant, the thing that matters is the danger in the specific situations that result in civilian casualties. Dangerous sounding 911 calls, people acting erratic or having trouble following instructions, etc. We don't really know those numbers, but they're the numbers that actually matter.
No one is saying that police don't have a difficult job, but that's no excuse for killing innocent people, beating suspects, planting evidence, threatening citizens and lying in court. Police officers who conduct themselves with honor and integrity deserve our respect and praise, those who commit the previously mentioned transgressions deserve to be tossed in to jail with the rest of the criminals.
You're conflating two problems, 1) civilian casualties, and 2) officer malfeasance. There's certainly overlap, but I think it's possible to have an extremely honorable police force devoid of malfeasance that still manages to kill some civilians. The root question is one of tactics, threat assessment, and training. Are there improvements that can be made, or is a bunch of civilians deaths an inevitable outcome of the tradeoffs involved with policing in the US.
Those tweets indicate that Swautistic is a serial swatter
Well, score another one for police — why was not the fake caller prosecuted after his very first crime?
He's probably using one or more proxies, if you have a decent amount of technical know how you can make yourself pretty difficult to track down. If you manage use TOR on top of it I'm not sure you're getting caught unless the NSA gets interested.
Of course, that's assuming he hasn't left any clues elsewhere. The money has to get into his hands at some point and his tweets and previous SWATs probably left some clues.
And if he was being truthful that he was a victim of swatting, and that people in his personal life know what he's doing... well that's a couple real easy ways to get caught.
false report of a bomb threat at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that disrupted a high-profile public meeting on the net neutrality debate
Ah, well, that changes everything. If a crime is committed for a noble cause, the criminal becomes a hero...
I don't believe I've seen anyone react to that bomb threat with anything other than disapproval.
I'm sure exceptions exist, but I see no evidence of him being considered a hero for the bomb threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Age can be determined by teeth.
The Swedes tried to do that. Most refugees destroy their documents so they can't be deported and Sweden gives preference to children. It turned out that most of the 'child refugees' they were admitting were over 18.
https://www.thelocal.se/201712...
The Migration Agency has so far made 5,700 decisions on the basis of assessments carried out by Rättsmedicinalverket. In 79 percent of those cases the agency decided to formally consider the applicant as older than they had initially claimed in their asylum application, reports Svenska Dagbladet (SvD).
Between mid-March and late October, Rättsmedicinalverket carried out a total of 7,858 age assessments. Of those, it found that their examination suggested 6,628 were 18 or older, and 112 "possibly" 18 or older.
The left - who wanted to let in the refugees - claimed that doing tests were a violation of human rights of course and fought the introduction of them to the bitter end. You can expect something similar to happen in Germany.
Wrong, most of the claimed child refugees submitted for testing were adults. But they only tested a refuge when they thought they were lying. No one is going to bother doing an assessment of a 10 year old.
Further down in the same article:
As a result, in September last year the government asked for medical age assessments to be carried out on a large scale.
More than 80,000 minors (of whom 37,000 arrived in the country without a parent or guardian) applied for asylum in Sweden in 2015 and 2016. Medical age assessments are carried out only in cases where the Migration Agency believes there is reason to doubt their age.
There's every reason to believe that a substantial majority of the child refugees are actually children.
... do not carry phone when performing criminal acts.
That seems like quite an inconvenience.
Maybe I'll get a burner phone so I can still catch some Pokemon while I'm out murdering.
I know that no one has found a true fix to the scaling issues, but newer coins have technical advances that alleviate them somewhat.
What's stopping the Bitcoin network from adopting one of them? Is it that hard to get them to agree on something? Do they just not recognize the problem?
That's garbage talk there... The oil companies suppressed nothing, they produced energy at the lowest possible cost is all.
What happened is fossil fuels remained cheaper than the alternative so the ROI wasn't there to justify alternate sources of energy. The market chooses the cheapest viable alternative. That was fossil fuels. The oil companies just delivered us what we where willing to pay for.
So, in your parlance and using your logic, the problem was regulation that didn't make fossil fuels more expensive... So government is the problem, if we use your logic.
Not that I agree, I think fossil fuels are a fine thing myself and has contributed mightily to the creation of wealth and increased standards of living world wide.
They're cheaper only if you don't count the externalized costs of the environment damage, costs that they deliberately hid.
There's two ways to deal with that.
The standard liberal approach is government regulation.
The standard libertarian approach is a lawsuit, which is exactly what NYC is doing.
And if they hadn't "covered it up" (going back to the 70's/80's, if I remember the claims correctly), what action would the cities have taken to mitigate the release of CO2?
Possibly nothing.
The point isn't that cities specifically would have done X if Oil Companies hadn't deceived them about climate change.
The point is the product produced by Oil Companies harms cities, and the Oil Companies covered up that harm.
IANAL and IANAJ, but I should think a logical requirement for the cities to prevail should be for the cities to demonstrate there is some reasonable action that they would have taken had this "fraud" not been committed.
IANAL either but the cities should only need to show that if not for the fraud then someone would have taken action to reduce the damages.
And that's a trivial bar to clear. Non-carbon energy sources were around for this entire period and would have received much more investment and development. The Kyoto protocol which would have reduced CO2 emissions, and damages, failed in large part because of the disinformation campaign from the Oil Industry.
Without the cover up we'd have much less CO2 in the atmosphere and thus fewer damages, both now and especially in the future, from global warming.
York City's five pension funds have about $5 billion in fossil fuel investments.
So if NYC wins, do they also have to take responsibility for being a a co-conspirator? They did help the oil companies by financing what they were doing with $5 billion in just the pension funds alone. What other investments do/did they have with oil and coal I wonder? How much fossil fuel was, and still is used by NYC? Are they going to shut down all of the ports that oil burning ships dock at? What about all of the freight by diesel truck and trains? How about all of the stock brokers on Wall Street that deal with investments in oil and coal? They should go after them too.
I'm all for being responsible for the environment, but this is just stupid.
I actually think it has a shot.
Not because the Oil Companies emitted fossil fuels in the past, or because they continue to emit them now, but because of the cover up.
I think the central claims would be:
1) Exxon Mobil, BP, etc all knew that global warming was real and that their product could incur major costs on coastal cities like NYC.
2) They conspired to cover up and mislead the public about #1.
If those two facts are true I think they do deserve to pay damages.
The only awkward bit is the fact that a class action lawsuit involving a major portion of the planet makes a lot more sense.
Note, I don't think smaller producers or manufactures would bear the same legal liability since even if they knowingly mislead the public their individual contributions would be too small to incur distinct damages.
If this passes a vote, then Net Neutrality lives to see another day.
If it doesn't pass, then those who voted against it will have declared themselves on the issue.
Either way it's time for them all to get off the fence.
If this passes a vote in the Senate then Paul Ryan can simply ignore it and it will never come up for a vote in the house (and congressional GOP members won't be on record as voting against it).
If Paul Ryan does schedule a vote, and it does pass congress, then Trump still has the option of vetoing it.
In fact, if they were being really devious, the Senate could pass the bill unanimously and the House could never schedule a vote. So NN is still dead and no one is on record as opposing it.
It certainly wouldn't be the most suspicious death by someone who ran afoul of the US Intelligence Community.
That being said I wouldn't assume there was foul play in this case, people do regularly kill themselves, even people whom other people have a good motive to kill.
And from the sounds of it he was no longer involved with the project, if you were going to try pressure someone in the hopes of uncovering a source, and then kill said someone to shut them up, he wouldn't really be the logical target.
How can it be possible that a big company like Western Digital constructs a backdoor to your personal data? Such a company - and it's owners - should shut down, prosecuted and put behind bars for many - many - years... This is not an accident. This is making sure by design they (and maybe their partners, workforce, ex-workforce and 3-letter agencies) have acces to your private data. I for one will never buy another device from Western. Who knows what they have done to the IC's in their harddisks to provide access to my data. I can not look into a chip and they know that!
It's a massive screwup, though we don't really know how it got there yet, a few quick scenarios are:
1) It could have been a deliberate backdoor for WD, the government, etc, that was sanctioned by the highest levels of the company, but this seems quite unlikely.
2) It could be a malicious employee (or even outside attacker) who introduced the backdoor for their own purposes.
3) An individual or team who didn't know any better put it there.
4) An individual or team added it for testing purposes, and people forget and never pulled it out.
My money would be on 3 or 4, reading the advisory from the security researcher it sounds like there was a lot of sloppiness in the WD code.
It sounds like it was inherited from another WD product that got patched in 2014 (but the patch was never ported to this device) so my money is on crappy software processes.
For those of us, like me, who were confused how Democrats could force a vote when bills could only be brought to the floor for a vote by the House Majority Leader. It turns out that the congressional review act specifically allows a vote to be schedule by 30 senators sponsoring a bill, bypassing the House Majority Leader.
Protected classes. Race and gender are protected classes everywhere in the US, and political affiliation (and activities) are a protected class in California.
I remember people claiming that DaMore was a liberal or democrat, but I guess that's clarified now.
He might have been. But then he got fired, became vilified by Progressive activists, and spent 4 months being courted by Conservative activists. I'm sure the plan now is to martyr him, get him on some cable news panels, and stick him on the Conservative speaking circuit.
I have no idea what his personal leanings are, nor how amendable he is to the plan as described, but this lawsuit certainly fits the script.
> Because right now they won't be currencies, nothing I've seen suggests they can scale to the necessary number of transactions.
The top 5 currencies are processing about 3 million transactions per day: https://bitinfocharts.com/comp...
That is about 2% of VISA's network average, and Bitcoin Cash alone can scale up to ~11 million per day.
Those 5 currencies have the equivalent value of South Korea's M1 money supply.
So that's not as big a gap as I thought, but there's still the delay it takes for a transaction to go through, which in my understanding is restricted by the ability of the network to authenticate and agree on the transaction.
Is the assumption that retailers basically won't bother to wait and eat the fraud risk? Or that they'll still be using credit cards to do the transaction?
Nope, we as human creatures can't be trusted to have a public use anything, unless it's got a self-enforcement or monitoring mechanism which sort of defeats the whole idea.
I think the trouble is with all of these bike shares you're always going to have individuals who will try to push the limits of what's accepted. And if there's no consequence they'll keep pushing those limits those limits will become the new standard for what is accepted. And then people will then push the new standard as well.
Collective goods are possible, but you need some sort of re-enforcement, either positive or negative, to keep people acting responsibly. Otherwise you're relying on people to act responsibly when they see everyone else getting away with being a bad actor.
There are only so many people in the world smart enough to even fully understand modern superscalar designs let alone contribute usefully to it.
I doubt that's true.
The problem wasn't the lack of people smart enough to spot the bug, it was the fact the bug was created 20 years ago back when people probably weren't thinking about bugs like that. And then in the 20 years since there probably weren't many people with a reason to start digging into that level of the design.
I'm not sure open source would have made a big difference, it gives you more eyes in some cases, but as OpenSSL demonstrated people only read the code they change, so old code that "just works" tends not to get looked at too closely.
It's unreal how much anti crypto talk there is here. This used to be a site for nerds and now it's just frigging negative crabby assholes. Bitpay in the USA was not hurt by this it was the VISA partner in Europe that wasn't following rules. If it were a crack down on blockchain it'd be everywhere and every partner of VISA dealing with it.
Ok, so baring some breakthrough in technology describe to me the state of cryptocurrencies in 20 years.
Because right now they won't be currencies, nothing I've seen suggests they can scale to the necessary number of transactions.
And they won't be gold either. Right now some unknown relative could die, will me a house, and if I found a pile of gold inside I could turn that into currency.
There's a lot of people who can't access their own cryptocurrencies from 5 years ago.
In 20 years I can see cryptocurrencies hanging around as a form of blackmarket currency, but without something gamechanging I can't see them being anything else.
Seriously - anyone who knows enough should know that this bug (being able to read tiny amounts of kmem ONLY during a specific sequence of speculative instructions; bad but hardly an open port) requires: malware to already be running on your system (in which case you are already screwed);
So any remote exploit or a multi-user server with a hostile user.
"I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices."
Someone refusing to sell doesn't determine the price, someone willing to buy (or sell) does. If bitcoin devolves to the point where nobody who's got it is willing to sell, then it's really dead.
Ultimately yes. But the fewer people willing to sell the lower the supply for people who want to buy, and that will keep the price up.
I expect bitcoin to keep yo-yo-ing for a bit, there will be a lot of people getting back in hoping for it to hit $20k again, and they may be right. Since bitcoin is pure speculation there is no proper value, $100 was a bubble, as was $1000, as was $20k. I think the sheer amount of capital is going to limit another big jump, but if common sense didn't halt it previously why should it now?
Because the blockchain is centralized
Blockchain isn't centralized.
Bad phrasing on my part.
It's centralized in the sense that the blockchain is a distributed database. There's a limit to how much throughput the system can handle.
As the followup comment suggested unsharded is a better description of what I meant.
Yeah, I assume a private network, or a network comprised of only certain parties (ie levels of government with the authority to modify the ledger).
As to the the advantage over a database, the blockchain is distributed and has a history of transactions for units (and a way to break up units) by design. Just like any tech you can do that stuff with a DB, but it might be more natural to pull off with a blockchain,
Cryptocurrencies may succeed, but Bitcoin has too many limitations in it that newer cryptocurrencies don't have.
Which ones? There was recently an article about Iota but it sounds like it has some serious technical flaws. As to newer blockchain cryptocurriencies, my understanding is they generally improve on bitcoin's technical issues, but they don't actually solve them. If they had one of them would have probably overtaken bitcoin.
I don't see it crashing below January 2017 levels any time soon, but it will be below $5000 by the end of the decade.
The one thing it does have is market dominance and relatively wide acceptance.
I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices. But at some point people will start wondering what bitcoin is actually supposed to be good for.
The future of cryptocurrencies will be in:
1) Bank/government/other-big-corporation-backed currencies
Wasn't the purpose of bitcoin to take the power away from banks and central governments?
2) A cryptocurrency that is what Bitcoin was in the beginning - a hard-to-track, very-low-transaction-cost currency that doesn't give people with special equipment a significant advantage.
The one thing that may hamper 2) is if mining is concentrated in one part of the world due to cheap energy. That can lead to cartels and loss of trust as a "nearly anonymous" medium of exchange.
The low transaction cost was due to its obscurity, the high transaction cost seems to be a fundamental feature of the blockchain and high throughput.
As a currency its a complete failure so far.
I was doing some research and some companies are trying to make it work as an inventory tracker.
Every time I see the tech in practice, it seems to be easily replaceable by a secure database, which appears to have all the features of blockchain except the supposed anonymity, and a secure database doesn't have problems like a 51% attack, nor the ridiculous time per transaction or cost per transaction problems.
Seems like blockchain so far is workable as a very expensive type of unregulated gambling.
There's a lot of places thinking about using the blockchain for land ledgers. The trouble with land ledgers is a lot of people and groups need access but it's really hard to keep track of and keep everything updated, especially in less developed countries. The blockchain solves this by making the information both widely accessible and trustworthy. Best part is land doesn't change hands much so you don't have the scalability issues of bitcoin.
Because the blockchain is centralized I don't see how it could ever scale to the levels needed for a regular currency.
And as a store of value, ie digital gold, they're really hard to store and really easy to steal.
I can only see two good functions for bitcoin.
1) The black market, I think this is low volume enough to make bitcoin feasible.
2) If anyone ever solves the scalablility issues bitcoin has a ton of invested parties and will likely integrate the fix. Giving it legitimate value.
The emergency dispatcher who didn't ask the right questions to determine if it was a prank is also somewhat negligent. The call was to the city hall, not 9-1-1, and described a different home than where the murder took place.
What sort questions? Is this a hoax? What's the name of your neighbourhood school?
Recall the 911 call came from an individual who had supposedly killed someone, was considering killing several more people, and was potentially having some kind of mental breakdown. And while we know it was a hoax know most calls like that are going to be legitimate.
Her only job was to keep him calm so he didn't finish off the rest of the family.
Ah yes, the "police officers have a dangerous job" excuse. You do realize that statistically speaking being a police officer doesn't even make the top 10 dangerous jobs in terms of risk to life and limb right?
You also realize that statistically speaking most of "being a police officer" involves driving around in a patrol car, sitting at a desk filling out reports, and performing traffic stops with people who are completely calm and behaving normally.
The absolute danger rate isn't relevant, the thing that matters is the danger in the specific situations that result in civilian casualties. Dangerous sounding 911 calls, people acting erratic or having trouble following instructions, etc. We don't really know those numbers, but they're the numbers that actually matter.
I do think police are way too trigger happy, but I also know that some situations might be riskier than they appear.
No one is saying that police don't have a difficult job, but that's no excuse for killing innocent people, beating suspects, planting evidence, threatening citizens and lying in court. Police officers who conduct themselves with honor and integrity deserve our respect and praise, those who commit the previously mentioned transgressions deserve to be tossed in to jail with the rest of the criminals.
You're conflating two problems, 1) civilian casualties, and 2) officer malfeasance. There's certainly overlap, but I think it's possible to have an extremely honorable police force devoid of malfeasance that still manages to kill some civilians. The root question is one of tactics, threat assessment, and training. Are there improvements that can be made, or is a bunch of civilians deaths an inevitable outcome of the tradeoffs involved with policing in the US.
Well, score another one for police — why was not the fake caller prosecuted after his very first crime?
He's probably using one or more proxies, if you have a decent amount of technical know how you can make yourself pretty difficult to track down. If you manage use TOR on top of it I'm not sure you're getting caught unless the NSA gets interested.
Of course, that's assuming he hasn't left any clues elsewhere. The money has to get into his hands at some point and his tweets and previous SWATs probably left some clues.
And if he was being truthful that he was a victim of swatting, and that people in his personal life know what he's doing... well that's a couple real easy ways to get caught.
Ah, well, that changes everything. If a crime is committed for a noble cause, the criminal becomes a hero...
I don't believe I've seen anyone react to that bomb threat with anything other than disapproval.
I'm sure exceptions exist, but I see no evidence of him being considered a hero for the bomb threat.