That's an interesting point. I looked up what the FSA has to say about this. The rules seem to be laid out in this document. It defines e-money as:
monetary value as represented by a claim on the issuer which is:
(i) stored on an electronic device; and
(ii) accepted as a means of payment by persons other than the issuer
Bitcoin satisfies both points 1 and 2 - but, note that this has to be a "claim on the issuer". Bitcoin does not have a specific issuer. The closest you might find are the miners, who create new currency, but I think a clever lawyer could argue even they are not really "issuers" because they cannot control how much money they create, and the money that is created is assigned to the miner not anyone else. It'd be more accurate to say miners are collectively rewarded by all of the systems participants for securing the network, with a de-facto agreement that finding a block rewards you with coins.
But even if you define a miner to be an issuer of the currency, Bitcoins do not represent claims on them. Miners have no obligations to accept Bitcoins in return for anything. There are no guarantees made by anyone that Bitcoins can be redeemed for anything in particular. For this reason I think it's unclear whether the FSA rules would apply. The rationale for the rules makes sense as long as the e-money issued is backed by something else, which was a pretty reasonable assumption until Bitcoin came along. The rule that says e-money issuers must have at least 1 million euros in liquid assets has no rational basis for miners however, as miners do not back the currency.
At any rate, this will be an interesting discussion between lawyers and regulators in coming years I'm sure. One thing to bear in mind is that it's not necessarily (as so often painted) an "us vs them" fight. One reason Bitcoin is interesting is that it lets people be more independent of banks. Politicans know that in the wake of the financial collapse there has been a crisis of trust and confidence in banks. Many ordinary people are quite disgusted with how bankers gambled with the system, were then bailed out and immediately went back to paying themselves massive bonuses. What's more whilst all politicians agree the system is broken, none of them have been able to propose convincing solutions. Basel 3 etc are incomplete at best. If Bitcoin is marketed well, it could easily be seen by seized by forward thinking politicians as a solution to over-reliance on banks, thus making their constituents happier.
Why is it that every explanation of bit coin, including your attempt, is incoherent. Given it can't be explained I think it's a scam.
My explanation mostly focused on the problems of credit cards;) Bitcoin can be explained. Lots of people understand it. I understand your reaction, but "this is complicated" does not imply "this is a scam".
Let me try and address your questions.
(1) Bitcoin is a P2P mesh network. All nodes know about all transactions because they are broadcast. This is similar to how routers on the internet know where to route packets: all participants maintain a shared data structure. So there are no transactions that "never intersect".
(2) This is a "double spend". The answer is that one of them will win. Because of how transactions are broadcast a delay between the transactions of only a second means the first is much more likely to win than the second. But if you were to try spending the same coin to two destinations simultaneously the network would become briefly confused and which one wins would be hard to determine. After a few minutes a block will be found and the confusion will be resolved: there will be a clear winner.
(3) You can see the "trail of hashes" (actually signatures) at the block explorer. Conceptually it grows forever. In reality it's possible to delete transactions that are old enough, though the software people use today does not implement this optimization. So storage requirements won't grow forever, they are proportional to the amount of outstanding coins waiting to be spent.
(4) Oddly enough there's actually no such thing as a bitcoin, in the system itself. Transactions combine and split value. For example a transaction may import 30 BTC and then have two outputs, one of 10 BTC and another of 20 BTC. Those outputs are now available for spending. You can see this in the block explorer which may make it clearer.
(5) Yes, like any currency the ability to forge perfectly dooms the system. Example: at one point South Africa had to recall and destroy all copies of a particular type of bank note because a Nigerian gang found a way to make perfect forgeries. Bitcoins can't really be "forged" as such because the way they are created is by a form of mutual agreement amongst all parties. The closest equivalent would be if elliptic curve cryptography was broken. ECC has been around since the 80s and is extensively peer reviewed. It's believed to be just as good as RSA. The production rate is regulated by the difficulty rules. Coins are distributed in type of lottery amongst the people who are securing the network with their hash power. This is where things get complicated and if you want to learn more about that I suggest you read Satoshis white paper.
(6) At current network speeds a botnet of around 500,000+ machines could delay payments from going through or re-order them, allowing reversal of transactions. It doesn't open the system to arbitrary changes like stealing other peoples coins or creating value out of thin air (exception: "lightweight mode" clients as I described before, but nobody uses them today). There are only a handful of botnets that large, mind you.
If you have further questions you could try Satoshis paper, IRC or the forums.
I agree the article is badly written. Transactions take place between public keys. As a public key is just a big random number, they are essentially "anonymous" unless the key is linked to your identity somehow - for example, because somebody you traded with told the police "I sent X coins to Eldavo John and he used address Y".
That's why it's better described as pseudo-nonymous rather than fully anonymous. It's possible to break the anonymity if people co-operate. I'd say it provides about as much privacy as the regular internet does. An IP address is basically private to regular citizens. If you represent law enforcement and turn up at a bunch of companies with the right paperwork you can make everyone work together and the privacy of the IP address falls.
It can never grow very large because you need a pretty expensive infrastructure even to handle BitCoins and the only interests it serves will be those industries that want easy untraceable ways to exchange value for illegal products or to avoid taxation.
Well, to handle Bitcoins today all you need to do is install and run the software from bitcoin.org. It runs just fine on regular servers, desktops and even laptops - hardly expensive infrastructure. If the system takes off and traffic levels reach PayPal levels, running it on a laptop won't be feasible anymore, you'll need some kind of high end server. If the system really takes off and starts matching VISA, a node would have to be distributed and might take a rack of machines. It never really gets infeasible because there is a "lightweight mode" in which the resource requirements are much lower and the security properties are slightly weakened. In this mode it's quite possible to run the system on a smartphone. Your device is independent, but if somebody is able to overtake the networks hashing power it can be made to believe anything. Right now that's 1-2 terahashes/sec, not something that's going to be beaten by anything except rich, sophisticated organizations (big tech companies or governments).
But I think your question/pondering is more about whether Bitcoin has value beyond mischief. I think it clearly does, otherwise I wouldn't be working on it;) The existing electronic payments system isn't that great, really. To pay for something instantly over the internet today you have to use credit cards. Wiring money is an alternative but due to outdated banking systems it's extremely slow, money moved this way often moves slower than a physical truck would even though the transfer is actually electronic. It's also quite expensive.
Credit cards have a bunch of problems for both buyers and sellers. For sellers the biggest problems are chargebacks and the costs of taking part in the system. It's really hard to handle chargebacks. Big companies use sophisticated risk analyses to try and spot unusual behavior, smaller companies just bump the price of everything by 10% to handle the fact that some payments just won't happen. The costs of taking part are also a problem. You can't just install some software on your web server and go. Credit card details are basically big passwords, but in an inconvenient form that you can't change and that every merchant you buy things from must be given. Unsurprisingly, this is totally insecure even with the PCI auditing process that is intended to ensure merchants keep CC data safe. See the recent Sony breach for an example.
Credit cards aren't really great for buyers either. Whilst chargebacks are useful, you can't opt-out of the ability in order to get lower rates from the merchant, or set up some other kind of escrow scheme. For another, the system is very inflexible. Whilst you can theoretically take steps to secure your CC credentials better on your end, the fact that you share them with anyone you buy things from makes such effort mostly worthless. Finally they are kind of inconvenient. Despite being one big password you usually have to type in several long, hard to remember codes and
Right, TiVo-ization. That's why Googles own devices are reflashable out of the box, and that's why Android is open source (it doesn't have to be, right?).
Your bizarre rant might make a shred of sense if Android was heavily based on GPLd code written by other people. Other than the kernel and one or two components, the vast bulk is non-GPLd code written by Google.
Governments don't actually face a choice between "share info and have leaks" or "don't share info and don't". That's a false dichotomy.
Leaks tend to happen when things are being covered up that should not be covered up. Leakers take huge risks, as the sad case of Mannings treatment shows. They don't tend to do it for shits and giggles, or because of some anarchic belief that all secrets are bad. In the case of the Manning dumps he did it because he thought there were a lot of scandals and other things being wrongly suppressed.... and he was right!
So we can see there's a third option, which is, don't cover up large numbers of scandals. Instead when you screw up, admit it, and ensure everyone can see the measures to take to prevent repeat incidents. There are plenty of organizations that do this. The US Govt is not one of them.
I own a Xoom and haven't had any of the issues you guys are talking about. It's just as responsive as an iPad for me. Perhaps there's some configuration in which it's not. Also, the GUI is 3D accelerated in Honeycomb - look at the SDK release notes.
What deficiencies does he have in mind for the Xoom? Well, I mean except that it's not an iPad (this is Gruber after all)
Comparing the PlayBook and Xoom seems pretty ridiculous judging from this review. The Xoom does email out of the box, including a great Gmail integration. It runs every Android app out there today. Worst case scenario the UI is a bit too wide in landscape mode until you get a tablet optimized version. Other apps like games work perfectly. The UI is slick, responsive and easy to use. The web browser has more features like tabs and even an incognito mode. It does video chat well. I could go on... but having used both I'd say it's a very strong competitor to the iPad.
The danger with too much wind power isn't that you get some kind of sci-fi meltdown. It's that sudden changes in wind conditions cause huge fluctuations in grid voltage that occur faster than can be balanced using hydroelectric dams or gas generator plants. If that happen it's possible for the grid to experience a cascading failure that disables the entire countries electrical system, requiring a grid-wide black start. Most countries have never performed a from-zero black start.
Actually somebody from Google is reading. I work on the Google abuse team and am quite familiar with phone verification. The system you encountered is in use not just by us but several large websites that are targeted by spammers and abusers (Facebook and Craigslist do this too).
The point is not to verify your identity. The point is to increase the cost of spamming. That's why it doesn't matter that we don't already know your phone number. There is a description of what this system is about in the Gmail help forums, and there's also a description in the help center. It's possible that phone verification on Google Apps admin might not be linking to the right documentation, I'll look into that.
The phone number you provide is used only to send a code. It isn't used for marketing purposes or to correlate stuff (I don't even know how that would work). It's actually very expensive for us to do this, but we pay the resulting phone bill because it's important that we keep spammers off Google to avoid causing problems for third party mail networks who cannot block our IP addresses.
Google should be listening to this.... if WebOS Linux can do it successfully, certainly Android Linux can do it too.
Both the Nexus One and the Nexus S allow you to reflash the firmware without any jailbreaking required. So Google doesn't need to listen, it's already doing it. Not all phone manufacturers using Android allow this, but Google phones do.
This coming from the government that invented the PATRIOT act, national security letters and directly taps internet backbones. Do members of congress not understand what hypocrisy is or do they just not care?
Or you got a bot on your machine and you don't know it.
I saw an interesting talk on security/malware once. It had some screenshots of one of the top downloads from TPB (a Photoshop keygen or something). There were hundreds of comments saying it was clean, that the uploader was trusted etc. At time of release no virus scanners flagged it. In fact it uploaded all the passwords it could find on your computer to a machine in China and then generated a Photoshop key.
I walked away from that talk with the powerful impression that if you trust crap you get off piracy sites, you're asking to be owned.
Which law defines that duty, exactly? I've seen lots of debate over the years about to what extent companies are actually required to do what shareholders demand and the best answer I ended up with was the above one - it depends on what the agreement you signed when becoming a shareholder states.
What on earth are you talking about? The incident I mentioned had nothing to do with refusing to issue papers or foreign diplomats violating US laws. As for your citation request, here you go.
That's actually a bigger worry IMHO than whatever random stuff is on Twitter. The flow of cables from Wikileaks has dried up. They hardly released any at all since the new year.
Given that only 2000 of them have been released out of 250,000 they need to be stepping up the pace dramatically if they want these cables to ever see the light of day. But the exact opposite is happening. Is the biggest leak in history destined to actually be the smallest thanks to infighting and problems at Wikileaks, I wonder?
Uh, US diplomats were already tasked with illegally obtaining DNA and credit card numbers of other countries civil servants and politicians at the UN. That didn't seem to cause any diplomatic incident at all, so I really doubt the IP address of some Icelandic MP will even cause a ripple.
If the increase in sales to people who would have pirated the game is greater than the number of people who give up because it's too hard to use then they will indeed make them some money. Given the 90%+ piracy rates these sorts of games see, they'd need to lose a hell of a lot of users to bad DRM if it's actually effective at stopping piracy. That said, last I saw this DRM was already broken by somebody building a server emulator. It seems there wasn't any kind of crypto on the challenge/response protocol, which is a rather bizarre mistake to make.
Joel Spolski is a guy who runs a software company, and he used to be a program manager on Excel. However that's not why people give a shit about what he thinks. People read (past tense) his articles because they were pretty good, and explained stuff lots of people in the software business need to know but often don't. For instance if somebody doesn't understand Unicode, I often point them to his article explaining it.... because he did a pretty good job.
The real question is, who is Marc Garcia and why does the article submitter think we should care? In fairness, he says the "updated list" is just his personal opinion rather than something generally applicable, which is good because pretty much every software company I know would fail at least one or two of the points on there, including Google.
So let's say they didn't redact names in the first release. I recall the Pentagon itself finding that nobody had been harmed as a result of them, and I'm sure they looked pretty damn hard!
Ah right, sorry, I didn't mean "use BitCoin to send Wikileaks money". I meant to support it as a general statement against the existing banking system, the problems of which the Wikileaks fiasco happens to have clearly exposed but would have been problematic anyway.
Yes, this is total crap. Just more evidence that the banking system is more corrupt than anyone ever imagined. I mean Visa and MasterCard were content to deal with the Canadian Pharmacy operation for a DECADE and now suddenly the financial institutions are ganging up on WikiLeaks of all things?
Remember guys. If you want to do something about this, your best bet is to support BitCoin, a peer to peer currency with a small but rapidly growing economy. A BitCoin is worth roughly 25 cents on the exchanges. The production BitCoin network needs your CPU or GPU time to grow stronger, so mosey on over and grab the distribution. It's MIT/X11 licensed.
Does anyone in the USA actually believe the constitution has power anymore? I mean, I regularly see Americans argue from the position of "You can't do that, it's unconstitutional" yet the right to not be imprisoned without charges and a trial is the only right that is included in the original text, sans amendments.
If Manning ends up in a Guantanamo type limbo nobody will be surprised. Very sad. Especially given how unreliable a witness Lamo is. If Lamo is the only thing they have on Manning then a good defence lawyer could make great progress with his case.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting point. I looked up what the FSA has to say about this. The rules seem to be laid out in this document. It defines e-money as:
Bitcoin satisfies both points 1 and 2 - but, note that this has to be a "claim on the issuer". Bitcoin does not have a specific issuer. The closest you might find are the miners, who create new currency, but I think a clever lawyer could argue even they are not really "issuers" because they cannot control how much money they create, and the money that is created is assigned to the miner not anyone else. It'd be more accurate to say miners are collectively rewarded by all of the systems participants for securing the network, with a de-facto agreement that finding a block rewards you with coins.
But even if you define a miner to be an issuer of the currency, Bitcoins do not represent claims on them. Miners have no obligations to accept Bitcoins in return for anything. There are no guarantees made by anyone that Bitcoins can be redeemed for anything in particular. For this reason I think it's unclear whether the FSA rules would apply. The rationale for the rules makes sense as long as the e-money issued is backed by something else, which was a pretty reasonable assumption until Bitcoin came along. The rule that says e-money issuers must have at least 1 million euros in liquid assets has no rational basis for miners however, as miners do not back the currency.
At any rate, this will be an interesting discussion between lawyers and regulators in coming years I'm sure. One thing to bear in mind is that it's not necessarily (as so often painted) an "us vs them" fight. One reason Bitcoin is interesting is that it lets people be more independent of banks. Politicans know that in the wake of the financial collapse there has been a crisis of trust and confidence in banks. Many ordinary people are quite disgusted with how bankers gambled with the system, were then bailed out and immediately went back to paying themselves massive bonuses. What's more whilst all politicians agree the system is broken, none of them have been able to propose convincing solutions. Basel 3 etc are incomplete at best. If Bitcoin is marketed well, it could easily be seen by seized by forward thinking politicians as a solution to over-reliance on banks, thus making their constituents happier.
My explanation mostly focused on the problems of credit cards ;) Bitcoin can be explained. Lots of people understand it. I understand your reaction, but "this is complicated" does not imply "this is a scam".
Let me try and address your questions.
(1) Bitcoin is a P2P mesh network. All nodes know about all transactions because they are broadcast. This is similar to how routers on the internet know where to route packets: all participants maintain a shared data structure. So there are no transactions that "never intersect".
(2) This is a "double spend". The answer is that one of them will win. Because of how transactions are broadcast a delay between the transactions of only a second means the first is much more likely to win than the second. But if you were to try spending the same coin to two destinations simultaneously the network would become briefly confused and which one wins would be hard to determine. After a few minutes a block will be found and the confusion will be resolved: there will be a clear winner.
(3) You can see the "trail of hashes" (actually signatures) at the block explorer. Conceptually it grows forever. In reality it's possible to delete transactions that are old enough, though the software people use today does not implement this optimization. So storage requirements won't grow forever, they are proportional to the amount of outstanding coins waiting to be spent.
(4) Oddly enough there's actually no such thing as a bitcoin, in the system itself. Transactions combine and split value. For example a transaction may import 30 BTC and then have two outputs, one of 10 BTC and another of 20 BTC. Those outputs are now available for spending. You can see this in the block explorer which may make it clearer.
(5) Yes, like any currency the ability to forge perfectly dooms the system. Example: at one point South Africa had to recall and destroy all copies of a particular type of bank note because a Nigerian gang found a way to make perfect forgeries. Bitcoins can't really be "forged" as such because the way they are created is by a form of mutual agreement amongst all parties. The closest equivalent would be if elliptic curve cryptography was broken. ECC has been around since the 80s and is extensively peer reviewed. It's believed to be just as good as RSA. The production rate is regulated by the difficulty rules. Coins are distributed in type of lottery amongst the people who are securing the network with their hash power. This is where things get complicated and if you want to learn more about that I suggest you read Satoshis white paper.
(6) At current network speeds a botnet of around 500,000+ machines could delay payments from going through or re-order them, allowing reversal of transactions. It doesn't open the system to arbitrary changes like stealing other peoples coins or creating value out of thin air (exception: "lightweight mode" clients as I described before, but nobody uses them today). There are only a handful of botnets that large, mind you.
If you have further questions you could try Satoshis paper, IRC or the forums.
I agree the article is badly written. Transactions take place between public keys. As a public key is just a big random number, they are essentially "anonymous" unless the key is linked to your identity somehow - for example, because somebody you traded with told the police "I sent X coins to Eldavo John and he used address Y".
That's why it's better described as pseudo-nonymous rather than fully anonymous. It's possible to break the anonymity if people co-operate. I'd say it provides about as much privacy as the regular internet does. An IP address is basically private to regular citizens. If you represent law enforcement and turn up at a bunch of companies with the right paperwork you can make everyone work together and the privacy of the IP address falls.
Well, to handle Bitcoins today all you need to do is install and run the software from bitcoin.org. It runs just fine on regular servers, desktops and even laptops - hardly expensive infrastructure. If the system takes off and traffic levels reach PayPal levels, running it on a laptop won't be feasible anymore, you'll need some kind of high end server. If the system really takes off and starts matching VISA, a node would have to be distributed and might take a rack of machines. It never really gets infeasible because there is a "lightweight mode" in which the resource requirements are much lower and the security properties are slightly weakened. In this mode it's quite possible to run the system on a smartphone. Your device is independent, but if somebody is able to overtake the networks hashing power it can be made to believe anything. Right now that's 1-2 terahashes/sec, not something that's going to be beaten by anything except rich, sophisticated organizations (big tech companies or governments).
But I think your question/pondering is more about whether Bitcoin has value beyond mischief. I think it clearly does, otherwise I wouldn't be working on it ;) The existing electronic payments system isn't that great, really. To pay for something instantly over the internet today you have to use credit cards. Wiring money is an alternative but due to outdated banking systems it's extremely slow, money moved this way often moves slower than a physical truck would even though the transfer is actually electronic. It's also quite expensive.
Credit cards have a bunch of problems for both buyers and sellers. For sellers the biggest problems are chargebacks and the costs of taking part in the system. It's really hard to handle chargebacks. Big companies use sophisticated risk analyses to try and spot unusual behavior, smaller companies just bump the price of everything by 10% to handle the fact that some payments just won't happen. The costs of taking part are also a problem. You can't just install some software on your web server and go. Credit card details are basically big passwords, but in an inconvenient form that you can't change and that every merchant you buy things from must be given. Unsurprisingly, this is totally insecure even with the PCI auditing process that is intended to ensure merchants keep CC data safe. See the recent Sony breach for an example.
Credit cards aren't really great for buyers either. Whilst chargebacks are useful, you can't opt-out of the ability in order to get lower rates from the merchant, or set up some other kind of escrow scheme. For another, the system is very inflexible. Whilst you can theoretically take steps to secure your CC credentials better on your end, the fact that you share them with anyone you buy things from makes such effort mostly worthless. Finally they are kind of inconvenient. Despite being one big password you usually have to type in several long, hard to remember codes and
Right, TiVo-ization. That's why Googles own devices are reflashable out of the box, and that's why Android is open source (it doesn't have to be, right?).
Your bizarre rant might make a shred of sense if Android was heavily based on GPLd code written by other people. Other than the kernel and one or two components, the vast bulk is non-GPLd code written by Google.
Wait, what? Isn't that the entire point of WikiLeaks - that without leaks we don't know what they're up to?
You realize the recent WikiLeaks dump revealed all kinds of ludicrous "decisions" (using the term loosely) were being made, right?
Governments don't actually face a choice between "share info and have leaks" or "don't share info and don't". That's a false dichotomy.
Leaks tend to happen when things are being covered up that should not be covered up. Leakers take huge risks, as the sad case of Mannings treatment shows. They don't tend to do it for shits and giggles, or because of some anarchic belief that all secrets are bad. In the case of the Manning dumps he did it because he thought there were a lot of scandals and other things being wrongly suppressed .... and he was right!
So we can see there's a third option, which is, don't cover up large numbers of scandals. Instead when you screw up, admit it, and ensure everyone can see the measures to take to prevent repeat incidents. There are plenty of organizations that do this. The US Govt is not one of them.
I own a Xoom and haven't had any of the issues you guys are talking about. It's just as responsive as an iPad for me. Perhaps there's some configuration in which it's not. Also, the GUI is 3D accelerated in Honeycomb - look at the SDK release notes.
What deficiencies does he have in mind for the Xoom? Well, I mean except that it's not an iPad (this is Gruber after all)
Comparing the PlayBook and Xoom seems pretty ridiculous judging from this review. The Xoom does email out of the box, including a great Gmail integration. It runs every Android app out there today. Worst case scenario the UI is a bit too wide in landscape mode until you get a tablet optimized version. Other apps like games work perfectly. The UI is slick, responsive and easy to use. The web browser has more features like tabs and even an incognito mode. It does video chat well. I could go on ... but having used both I'd say it's a very strong competitor to the iPad.
The danger with too much wind power isn't that you get some kind of sci-fi meltdown. It's that sudden changes in wind conditions cause huge fluctuations in grid voltage that occur faster than can be balanced using hydroelectric dams or gas generator plants. If that happen it's possible for the grid to experience a cascading failure that disables the entire countries electrical system, requiring a grid-wide black start. Most countries have never performed a from-zero black start.
Actually somebody from Google is reading. I work on the Google abuse team and am quite familiar with phone verification. The system you encountered is in use not just by us but several large websites that are targeted by spammers and abusers (Facebook and Craigslist do this too).
The point is not to verify your identity. The point is to increase the cost of spamming. That's why it doesn't matter that we don't already know your phone number. There is a description of what this system is about in the Gmail help forums, and there's also a description in the help center. It's possible that phone verification on Google Apps admin might not be linking to the right documentation, I'll look into that.
The phone number you provide is used only to send a code. It isn't used for marketing purposes or to correlate stuff (I don't even know how that would work). It's actually very expensive for us to do this, but we pay the resulting phone bill because it's important that we keep spammers off Google to avoid causing problems for third party mail networks who cannot block our IP addresses.
Both the Nexus One and the Nexus S allow you to reflash the firmware without any jailbreaking required. So Google doesn't need to listen, it's already doing it. Not all phone manufacturers using Android allow this, but Google phones do.
This coming from the government that invented the PATRIOT act, national security letters and directly taps internet backbones. Do members of congress not understand what hypocrisy is or do they just not care?
robots.txt?
Or you got a bot on your machine and you don't know it.
I saw an interesting talk on security/malware once. It had some screenshots of one of the top downloads from TPB (a Photoshop keygen or something). There were hundreds of comments saying it was clean, that the uploader was trusted etc. At time of release no virus scanners flagged it. In fact it uploaded all the passwords it could find on your computer to a machine in China and then generated a Photoshop key.
I walked away from that talk with the powerful impression that if you trust crap you get off piracy sites, you're asking to be owned.
Which law defines that duty, exactly? I've seen lots of debate over the years about to what extent companies are actually required to do what shareholders demand and the best answer I ended up with was the above one - it depends on what the agreement you signed when becoming a shareholder states.
What on earth are you talking about? The incident I mentioned had nothing to do with refusing to issue papers or foreign diplomats violating US laws. As for your citation request, here you go.
That's actually a bigger worry IMHO than whatever random stuff is on Twitter. The flow of cables from Wikileaks has dried up. They hardly released any at all since the new year.
Given that only 2000 of them have been released out of 250,000 they need to be stepping up the pace dramatically if they want these cables to ever see the light of day. But the exact opposite is happening. Is the biggest leak in history destined to actually be the smallest thanks to infighting and problems at Wikileaks, I wonder?
Uh, US diplomats were already tasked with illegally obtaining DNA and credit card numbers of other countries civil servants and politicians at the UN. That didn't seem to cause any diplomatic incident at all, so I really doubt the IP address of some Icelandic MP will even cause a ripple.
If the increase in sales to people who would have pirated the game is greater than the number of people who give up because it's too hard to use then they will indeed make them some money. Given the 90%+ piracy rates these sorts of games see, they'd need to lose a hell of a lot of users to bad DRM if it's actually effective at stopping piracy. That said, last I saw this DRM was already broken by somebody building a server emulator. It seems there wasn't any kind of crypto on the challenge/response protocol, which is a rather bizarre mistake to make.
Joel Spolski is a guy who runs a software company, and he used to be a program manager on Excel. However that's not why people give a shit about what he thinks. People read (past tense) his articles because they were pretty good, and explained stuff lots of people in the software business need to know but often don't. For instance if somebody doesn't understand Unicode, I often point them to his article explaining it .... because he did a pretty good job.
The real question is, who is Marc Garcia and why does the article submitter think we should care? In fairness, he says the "updated list" is just his personal opinion rather than something generally applicable, which is good because pretty much every software company I know would fail at least one or two of the points on there, including Google.
So let's say they didn't redact names in the first release. I recall the Pentagon itself finding that nobody had been harmed as a result of them, and I'm sure they looked pretty damn hard!
Ah right, sorry, I didn't mean "use BitCoin to send Wikileaks money". I meant to support it as a general statement against the existing banking system, the problems of which the Wikileaks fiasco happens to have clearly exposed but would have been problematic anyway.
Yes, this is total crap. Just more evidence that the banking system is more corrupt than anyone ever imagined. I mean Visa and MasterCard were content to deal with the Canadian Pharmacy operation for a DECADE and now suddenly the financial institutions are ganging up on WikiLeaks of all things?
Remember guys. If you want to do something about this, your best bet is to support BitCoin, a peer to peer currency with a small but rapidly growing economy. A BitCoin is worth roughly 25 cents on the exchanges. The production BitCoin network needs your CPU or GPU time to grow stronger, so mosey on over and grab the distribution. It's MIT/X11 licensed.
Like what?
Does anyone in the USA actually believe the constitution has power anymore? I mean, I regularly see Americans argue from the position of "You can't do that, it's unconstitutional" yet the right to not be imprisoned without charges and a trial is the only right that is included in the original text, sans amendments.
If Manning ends up in a Guantanamo type limbo nobody will be surprised. Very sad. Especially given how unreliable a witness Lamo is. If Lamo is the only thing they have on Manning then a good defence lawyer could make great progress with his case.