The China of 2014 is moving as quickly as it can towards becoming a major military power, and let us not forget that China is a nuclear power, so the idea that even if Japan went all the way, amended its constitution and formed a fully fleshed armed forces with nuclear capability (and everyone already believes that Japan is already nuclear capable), that it would mean the imminent invasion of China.
China does not fear invasion, or anything like it...
Japan could never prevent a Chinese invasion using conventional forces. On the other hand, if they had any substantial number of nuclear weapons they could make any invasion impossible and deliver a devastating blow to mainland China. The most China could do is ensure that neither country remained habitable, or maybe the rest of the planet if they let the conflict further escalate.
Nobody wins nuclear war. Nobody mounts a D-Day sized invasion against an enemy with tactical nuclear weapons either.
Even a conventional invasion of Japan is only possible if the US stays out of it. The US probably wouldn't use nuclear weapons unless it came down to full nuclear war. However, the US has plenty of very good subs and you can't send troop transports across a sea infested with enemy subs. China would have to neutralize US naval/air dominance in order to mount an invasion of Japan and supply it, and even if you agree that US carriers are useless the US has a lot of stuff other than carriers that could be used to counter an invasion.
Exactly. Nobody is suggesting that people should be able to download 24x7 at peak LTE speeds for free on their phones - clearly there just isn't the bandwidth for that as wireless is far more oversold than wired data is (well at least in an unlimited model - right now most providers have caps so it isn't really oversold).
What this is about is that your 2GB/month or whatever is good for any data from anybody, and that some providers are not better than others.
If anything there is more of a case for wireless to be neutral. With wired internet the border routers are a big choke point. With wireless the big choke point is the actual over-the-air connection and a packet is a packet no matter where it comes from as far as that link is concerned. Locality of data doesn't get you anywhere with wireless the way it does with wired networks.
Yeah, but CPUs are something that everybody already has and are idle most of the time.
If you buy one of these things, it is for the express purpose of generating hashes, and not a lot of them. Also, that unit is 10x faster than a CPU, but that is hardly earth-shattering. Serious mining equipment is measured in GH or even TH/s.
The global hash rate is 120PH/s. So, 51% of that would be about 100M of these devices.
Sure, if EVERYBODY in the US/EU bought one right now then hash generation would be truly distributed, but only if they upgraded them to newer hardware every other month.
Uh, you complain about foreclosures. Are you suggesting that Bitcoin offers some magical solution to obtaining a loan to buy a home when you don't have the money to pay cash?
Bitcoin simply regulates the total supply of a currency/minting/etc. It has nothing to do with who can kick you out of your house when you don't pay the loan on it.
Also, keep in mind that the reason that the banks didn't have the money that people deposited to them was because they gave it to the people that they're trying to foreclose on.
I'm no fan of the banks, but your description of the situation oversimplifies it greatly. I do sympathize with those who ended up with underwater mortgages (this is hard to avoid in a bubble unless you rent), but not really with those who took out loans that required payments that were more than a third of their total income at the time.
.. It's just the guys on the 3rd shift at Fort Meade, retasking server farm cycles.
Even Fort Meade couldn't pull this out without some kind of dedicated ASIC hardware (which is something they could pull off).
The current hash rate is 120E15 hashes per second, and 51% of that is about 60E15 hashes/second. It looks like with Xeons you might get something like 50E6 hashes per second. So, you just need a billion of those lying around to retask for the night shift. I don't think that the NSA has a billion high-end Intel CPUs - did Intel even make a billion of them? Maybe if they had a huge GPU-based cluster lying around they might make a significant dent, but I doubt they'd get to 51%.
The only way to mine any significant number of Bitcoins these days is to run ASICs. Even GPUs are obsolete now, and those are much faster than CPUs.
You still have to output valid blocks or every node will reject it.
The problem here is that you have a definition of "every node" which excludes 51+% of the nodes.
Distributed systems like this are often susceptible to commandeering by somebody willing to throw enough brute force at it. If the NSA spun up a million tor nodes then a significant percentage of network traffic would travel entirely through nodes they control and thus they could trace it trivially. If you go and play poker with a table full of people who are conspiring against you, then you're going to lose out big. Bitcoin is just another case of this - if the majority of the network is out to take advantage of you, and it is a consensus-based network, then you're in trouble.
While the threat of a 51% attack may be blown out of proportion (a pool sells their cut of the coins that are mined and it is in their best interest that the coin remain as valuable as possible - attacking a coin would be counterproductive), some altcoin developers have stated that they will change their coin's proof-of-work algorithm if ASICs are developed for it.
How can they know whether an ASIC was developed for it? All this does is gives miners incentive to develop ASICs but not disclose this to the world. It isn't like miners are audited to prove they're burning enough kWh to inefficiently mine all the coins they generate.
And what is next, requiring crippled mining software so that better programmers don't get an advantage? It seems like the whole point of an approach like these is to ditch the central bank. If you're going to basically have a central bank anyway, then why not just use a traditional currency and get some of the benefits of a central bank and not just the trust issues?
This is absolutely hilarious. Not because it's a fake post (I honestly don't know if it is or not), but just the fact that someone would even think that this is a good enough idea to post that 'serious' miners are actually doing this.
Uh, everything he posted is factually accurate, not that you would know per your own admission. I'm not sure what you mean by "good enough idea to post" - I'm not sure why adding facts to a discussion about Bitcoin wouldn't be a good idea.
He never claimed that the serious miners were making money. His point was that Bitcoin mining wasn't really a distributed operation any longer - at least not in the sense of everybody and their uncle doing it with 10% of their spare CPU capacity.
I won't disagree that trying to make money by mining Bitcoin doesn't make sense right now, because there is far more supply of mining than there is demand for it. If at some point the value settles down and it actually gets used in some significant volume of commerce then there would be a steady demand for mining, and it would be possible to make a very modest profit for mining once all the enthusiasm dies out. As you say, right now there is a gold rush which has created a bubble.
Bitcoin was never designed to give out free money to miners. They're a necessary part of the operation of the system, but as their supply goes up so does the difficulty level and the value of transaction costs right now is low since there aren't many transactions and half the miners will bless transactions for free.
The concentration of mining operations is a real problem for the protocol.
Nothing stops somebody running a big mining collective from taking some of the hashes they discover and submitting them under an anonymous ID and then just throwing away the bitcoins they receive for that one transaction.
The mining collectives brag about their results and of course they want to profit from the bitcoins, so they do it under their own name now.
Also, it doesn't have to be one big org - it could be a conspiracy between the operators of a few pools that add up to 51%. Those who run the orgs don't necessarily need to know about it either - would the board of some mining company notice if a few of their hashes weren't cashed in?
One would assume that the thousands of other miners, if it was really that important to them, could easily step up their collective games and provide more hashing power than ghash can...
I wouldn't assume this at all. Back when everybody was mining with CPUs then a popular appeal might get people to donate a ton of unused CPU capacity to beating a big miner.
However, today mining is done with ASICs which are many orders of magnitude faster than any CPU you can buy. An Intel CPU might mine 10-20 Mhash/s, and and ASIC stats are measured in high GH/s to the low TH/s. So, you'd need 100,000 CPUs dedicated to mining to equal a single ASIC unit.
The current hash rate is 100 PH/s having doubled in the last two months, or the equivalent of 10 billion Intel CPUs. Are there even 10 billion modern Intel CPUs in existence? You'd probably need $100M to just buy that many ASICs (if I didn't miscount my zeros), which gives you a sense of the scale of Bitcoin mining today. That mining collective operates about $50M worth of hardware, though I guess controlling an entire currency for a $50M investment isn't bad.
It is a bit like saying that if it was really important people could team up in neighborhoods and produce cars, and the collective might of the entire US population could outproduce the big 3 car manufacturers. The problem is that an optimized robot-assisted assembly line can churn out a LOT of cars, and building one by hand in a garage takes a very long time even setting aside the logistics nightmare which isn't much better when you're making one car vs a million of them. 10k workers in a factory could very well produce more cars than the entire rest of the population working at home combined.
We've known this for decades. What I can't figure out is why a pertussis only booster hasn't been marketed. We have the vaccine, we have much of the data. It would be fairly easy to do. (Insert favorite rant about the Medical Industrial Complex here.)
Unless there is sufficient clinical data on adults to justify an FDA approval on the booster it will cost probably $100M to develop one. Granted, by drug standards it isn't a big deal because the risk of failure would be pretty low. Still, a company would have to believe that they're going to sell a fair number of boosters to justify the expenditure, and the ongoing manufacturing costs.
The thing is, adults don't tend to get vaccinated like kids do, and there is no school forcing them to get vaccinated or fill out an exemption form.
It is the classic vaccine problem - until adults start getting sick often enough to be concerned about the disease, there won't be much of a market for the vaccine.
Good advice. An even bigger problem is when people report allergies to antibiotics that they aren't really allergic to (granted, doctors who are afraid of being sued and don't bother to confirm this don't help). If you report 10 antibiotic allergies to the doctor and end up in the hospital with sepsis for some reason, you may very well die from it. They're going to treat you with antibiotics that are rarely used because they don't work well and have nasty side-effects that will hit you hard while you're already weak, but they can't treat you with any of the stuff that is more appropriate because you reported allergies and they don't want to risk it while you're already ill.
So, if you think you're allergic to multiple classes of antibiotics do yourself a favor and talk to a doctor who will help you to confirm whether this is in fact the case. That knowledge just might save your life when you're in bad shape and the doctor knows how to treat you.
I haven't counted calories at all, so from an objective sense, I can't give precise amount of wha I used to eat compared to what I eat now.
I've tried both balanced calorie-counting diets and LCHF diets. I can vouch that the latter works FAR better.
I was able to lose weight on a balanced diet, and being a chemist who is a bit OCD I measured EVERYTHING that went into my mouth. What I will tell you is that while I did lose weight, I was always hungry. I was eating six small meals a day and while I was sitting at my desk at work I'd always be looking over to my bag of food just willing the clock to move so that I could eat my next meal. In the end I just couldn't do it any longer, and I regained the weight I had lost.
On the other hand, I've been on a LCHF diet for a year now. I can't say that my weight is as low as I want it to be, but I'm 50 pounds lighter than I was a year ago, and I'm lighter than I ever was on the balanced diet. Last night my wife ordered a cheesecake for desert and while I did taste a slight sliver of it I really didn't have any issues with watching her eat the bulk of it. If anything it tasted too sweet to me - when I do make low-carb treats (which I avoid mostly now) I often go easy on the sweeteners.
Being a fairly OCD person I'm probably fairly susceptible to addictive behaviors, and I think that part of the reason LCHF works for me is that it basically takes much of the pleasure out of eating. When I was in a bad mood I used to grab some ice cream or whatever in the past. Now I find something else to do or just deal with it. That lack of serotonin boost from sugar gets you out of that reinforcement loop when you eat.
From what I've read a lot of the pharmaceutical attempts to come up with diet drugs have failed due to side-effects of suicide. I wonder if that is due to the link to serotonin/etc. I think part of the problem with overeating is that it just makes you feel good when you do it, so people do it. If drugs get rid of the pleasure they'll break that conditioning cycle, but on the other hand if eating a pint of Ben and Jerry's doesn't cheer you up after a breakup maybe you're more likely to jump off of a bridge instead. It really makes you think about the neurology of depression.
In any case, the solution to such problems obviously isn't to keep eating food that puts you at risk for diabetes/etc.
I can't believe I haven't heard of this approach until now. That could really help to solve the problem with prefixes changing due to dynamic assignment. Basically each device can have both a globally routable address (which changes often), and a local address (which never changes).
Alas, this still means that I can't use the same DNS on the inside and outside of the network. It also means that I still have to deal with dynamic DNS updates for multiple hosts if I want them to have globally-reachable addresses.
It doesn't help that IPv6 doesn't play nicely with dynamic address assignment, which is of course how ISPs generally hand out addresses to home users. If you aren't using NAT (which has all the usual problems) then anytime your IP prefix changes all the devices in your house have to change addresses. So, no more mapping a network printer using just its IP, and I've yet to see a DNS implementation that easily handles IPv6 prefix changes.
Uh, you do realize that the thing that keeps the su app from being exploited is the very same sandboxing written by Google that keeps apps from exploiting each other in general, right?
UH, sandbox is only one of many possible attack vectors to compromise an app. what if it simply had a back door? have you inspected the source?
Thanks for pointing that out - I actually didn't realize SuperSU wasn't open source. Fortunately there are open source alternatives, like superuser.
And no, I don't plan to look at the source before I install it. Ditto for the linux kernel running on the phone, and the openssl library on my webserver.:)
How is trusting that SuperSU doesn't have bugs any different from trusting that the Linux kernel has zero bugs?
it's a matter of attack vectors. using SuperSU adds one more.
also, i'm willing to bet that the linux kernel gets a little more scrutiny and testing than your SU app. then again, it's much more code.
Sure, but we're talking about a very simple implementation. I guess having it is more risky than not having it, but on the other hand the alternative seems to be basically giving every app on your phone access to all your personal info, in which case I'm not sure what you're avoiding by not just giving them all root as well.
The actual su application is sandboxed by the OS like every other app. Again, if that doesn't work then you're already up the creek.
I do understand your point, but I honestly my concern with having SuperSU on my phone is just a bit lower than my concern with the fact that I've yet to see a browser that gives you a warning anytime you make an unauthenticated connection.
Well, if that is your concern the states already own everything from helicopters to tanks via the "National Guard" which is basically the militia.
However, the states aren't really organized to fight as independent units. Nor are they designed to be able to oppose the Federal Government. If for some reason the Pentagon decided to wage war on Kansas, the first sign the Kansas governor would have of it would be all his national guard bases being turned into parking lots, and then he is down to whatever small arms are secured in police stations. Good luck using those when the tanks and helicopters come rolling in.
If you really want states to be able to oppose the Federal Government then they'll need independent supply lines, secrecy from the Federal Government, and a budget the size of the US DoD budget. Oh, and you'll need to have some kind of operational framework where the states can all pick sides on short notice and properly coordinate with those on their side while killing everybody in the states that aren't in their site. Oh, for best results the states should have independent nuclear arsenals. Of course, if you're going to do that you might as well just have the Federal Government nuke everybody in the US since that will be about the same result as a modern civil war, and it will be way cheaper since we already have enough nukes to kill ourselves without having to quadruple our defense budget on multiple armies designed to fight each other.
Since WWII warfare has escalated to a point where first-world nations just can't engage in it against anybody other than third world nations. Could you imagine the results if the US/Russia went to war over Crimea? Conventionally I'd be inclined to think that Russia couldn't really stop an invasion force assuming they could all make it to the border with their supplies, but they certainly could sink ships and generally wreak havoc on strategic interests, and if it got to nuclear war then we've basically decided that instead of playing video games and debating on Slashdot we felt it was better to get into a huff over who administers a peninsula and give up anything more than subsistence farming/hunting for the next 3 generations or so.
no. it's the difference between a brick wall and a brick wall with a locked door in it. if you really don't want anyone to get in, you don't put a door in the first place, because a door has a locked that can be picked.
Well, more like a brick wall with 30,000 locked doors, and a brick wall with 30,012 locked doors. A modern OS has TONS of places that need to be secure to prevent a privilege escalation.
your "su" app is just software and is subject to bugs like any other. i love it how people don't trust google, but they trust the guy who wrote an "su" app in his mom's basement.
Uh, you do realize that the thing that keeps the su app from being exploited is the very same sandboxing written by Google that keeps apps from exploiting each other in general, right?
that's great, as long as you trust that SuperSU has zero bugs.
it's the difference between having a brick wall, and having a brick wall with a locked door. if you absolutely don't want people to get in, don't build a door in the first place.
How is trusting that SuperSU doesn't have bugs any different from trusting that the Linux kernel has zero bugs? I'm not aware of any privilege escalation bugs for SuperSU. I'm certainly aware that there have been many of them over the years for the Linux kernel.
Sure, having SuperSU installed is another place an attack can be made, but it is just one of MANY that already exist. The doors are already all over the place. Just about every android device out there can be rooted, despite the fact that very few of them are designed to be - those are all privilege escalation bugs of one sort or another, and none of those phones start out with SuperSU on them.
The sad truth about the travesty of Gitmo is that it was attempted to be closed but was blocked via procedural means.
Just set up a court and hold criminal trials. Try them in gitmo if you have to. Then they're either guilty or innocent.
Nobody objects to people being held in gitmo because the prison happens to be located at gitmo. The concern is that people are being held prisoner without any kind of trial or determination of guilt. Simply moving them around doesn't solve that.
Hold a trial, and if they're innocent you let them go. If the evil Republicans or whatever won't fund flying them home then just let them out at the gate of the army base and they can figure out what to go do with themselves. I can't imagine that Castro will want to keep them.
You can blame the Republicans all you want, but we already have an extra-constitutional prison that has a history of torturing prisoners. Does anybody really care if the president just ignores a congressional resolution denying funding for transferring prisoners? Presidents have been ignoring laws they don't like for the last decade. What are the republicans going to do about it - try to impeach another president?
If we're going to get into a big fuss over following the Constitution maybe we can start with giving people due process and obtaining warrants before you intercept every electronic communication on the planet.
No, it is not a moral judgement. You currently have no right to vote for representatives in other states and districts. And based on the design of the system, no such right is justified on any grounds.
The design of the system is what it is. It doesn't "justify" anything. However, nobody is going and voting in other districts. They're just spending billions of dollars to get the idiots who live there to vote differently.
The Constitution also doesn't establish a representative democracy where you aren't allowed by law to tamper with elections in other districts.
The US Constitution does not specify how states elect their representation, but the state constitutions do, and the US Constitution does not override them. Keep trying.
Ok, fine - you're being pedantic. The state constitutions ALSO don't establish a representative democracy where you aren't allowed by law to tamper with elections in other districts.
If I donate $1B to the opponent of your favorite representative, chances are that he will win the election, and I probably don't live anywhere near you.
So, if you want to argue that anything allowed by law is just fine, then you're going to let those populous states pick your representatives, because your neighbors are too dumb to vote for anybody other than the guy who sounds good on TV, and those big states donate far more to campaigns than you do.:)
If you want everyone's interests properly represented, you have to take the internal structure of the country into account. Otherwise you end up in a situation where only people living in the most populous areas get their voice heard, and the rest get screwed constantly.
How are they screwed? They get the exact same benefits as the folks in the populous areas. They just don't get a disproportionate number of votes.
Why does it make sense that the 38M voters in California get the same two votes in the Senate as the 1M voters in Rhode Island?
Uh, you do realize that root exists on the phone whether it is rooted or not, right?
please take a non-rooted phone and try to obtain root permissions. you can't. so no, apps absolutely cannot obtain root permissions on a non-rooted device.
Sure they can - there just has to be a local priv exploit. That's also the only way an app can get root permissions on a rooted device, unless you grant it to the app.
There isn't anything inherently insecure about a rooted device. Now, if you just grant access to su to any application that asks for it, then that is insecure.
However, the whole point of this article is that the Android OS will happily give away your IMEI, serial number, phone number, contact info, all the files on your sdcard, and whatever else an app asks for. So, unless you don't want to use the Facebook app, you're far better off rooting it to install XPrivacy than to leave it alone.
Slashdot Mirror
The China of 2014 is moving as quickly as it can towards becoming a major military power, and let us not forget that China is a nuclear power, so the idea that even if Japan went all the way, amended its constitution and formed a fully fleshed armed forces with nuclear capability (and everyone already believes that Japan is already nuclear capable), that it would mean the imminent invasion of China.
China does not fear invasion, or anything like it...
Japan could never prevent a Chinese invasion using conventional forces. On the other hand, if they had any substantial number of nuclear weapons they could make any invasion impossible and deliver a devastating blow to mainland China. The most China could do is ensure that neither country remained habitable, or maybe the rest of the planet if they let the conflict further escalate.
Nobody wins nuclear war. Nobody mounts a D-Day sized invasion against an enemy with tactical nuclear weapons either.
Even a conventional invasion of Japan is only possible if the US stays out of it. The US probably wouldn't use nuclear weapons unless it came down to full nuclear war. However, the US has plenty of very good subs and you can't send troop transports across a sea infested with enemy subs. China would have to neutralize US naval/air dominance in order to mount an invasion of Japan and supply it, and even if you agree that US carriers are useless the US has a lot of stuff other than carriers that could be used to counter an invasion.
Exactly. The US is about as likely to nuke somebody over Japan as Russia is likely to nuke somebody for stealing Crimea from the Ukraine.
Exactly. Nobody is suggesting that people should be able to download 24x7 at peak LTE speeds for free on their phones - clearly there just isn't the bandwidth for that as wireless is far more oversold than wired data is (well at least in an unlimited model - right now most providers have caps so it isn't really oversold).
What this is about is that your 2GB/month or whatever is good for any data from anybody, and that some providers are not better than others.
If anything there is more of a case for wireless to be neutral. With wired internet the border routers are a big choke point. With wireless the big choke point is the actual over-the-air connection and a packet is a packet no matter where it comes from as far as that link is concerned. Locality of data doesn't get you anywhere with wireless the way it does with wired networks.
Yeah, but CPUs are something that everybody already has and are idle most of the time.
If you buy one of these things, it is for the express purpose of generating hashes, and not a lot of them. Also, that unit is 10x faster than a CPU, but that is hardly earth-shattering. Serious mining equipment is measured in GH or even TH/s.
The global hash rate is 120PH/s. So, 51% of that would be about 100M of these devices.
Sure, if EVERYBODY in the US/EU bought one right now then hash generation would be truly distributed, but only if they upgraded them to newer hardware every other month.
Uh, you complain about foreclosures. Are you suggesting that Bitcoin offers some magical solution to obtaining a loan to buy a home when you don't have the money to pay cash?
Bitcoin simply regulates the total supply of a currency/minting/etc. It has nothing to do with who can kick you out of your house when you don't pay the loan on it.
Also, keep in mind that the reason that the banks didn't have the money that people deposited to them was because they gave it to the people that they're trying to foreclose on.
I'm no fan of the banks, but your description of the situation oversimplifies it greatly. I do sympathize with those who ended up with underwater mortgages (this is hard to avoid in a bubble unless you rent), but not really with those who took out loans that required payments that were more than a third of their total income at the time.
Even Fort Meade couldn't pull this out without some kind of dedicated ASIC hardware (which is something they could pull off).
The current hash rate is 120E15 hashes per second, and 51% of that is about 60E15 hashes/second. It looks like with Xeons you might get something like 50E6 hashes per second. So, you just need a billion of those lying around to retask for the night shift. I don't think that the NSA has a billion high-end Intel CPUs - did Intel even make a billion of them? Maybe if they had a huge GPU-based cluster lying around they might make a significant dent, but I doubt they'd get to 51%.
The only way to mine any significant number of Bitcoins these days is to run ASICs. Even GPUs are obsolete now, and those are much faster than CPUs.
You still have to output valid blocks or every node will reject it.
The problem here is that you have a definition of "every node" which excludes 51+% of the nodes.
Distributed systems like this are often susceptible to commandeering by somebody willing to throw enough brute force at it. If the NSA spun up a million tor nodes then a significant percentage of network traffic would travel entirely through nodes they control and thus they could trace it trivially. If you go and play poker with a table full of people who are conspiring against you, then you're going to lose out big. Bitcoin is just another case of this - if the majority of the network is out to take advantage of you, and it is a consensus-based network, then you're in trouble.
While the threat of a 51% attack may be blown out of proportion (a pool sells their cut of the coins that are mined and it is in their best interest that the coin remain as valuable as possible - attacking a coin would be counterproductive), some altcoin developers have stated that they will change their coin's proof-of-work algorithm if ASICs are developed for it.
How can they know whether an ASIC was developed for it? All this does is gives miners incentive to develop ASICs but not disclose this to the world. It isn't like miners are audited to prove they're burning enough kWh to inefficiently mine all the coins they generate.
And what is next, requiring crippled mining software so that better programmers don't get an advantage? It seems like the whole point of an approach like these is to ditch the central bank. If you're going to basically have a central bank anyway, then why not just use a traditional currency and get some of the benefits of a central bank and not just the trust issues?
This is absolutely hilarious. Not because it's a fake post (I honestly don't know if it is or not), but just the fact that someone would even think that this is a good enough idea to post that 'serious' miners are actually doing this.
Uh, everything he posted is factually accurate, not that you would know per your own admission. I'm not sure what you mean by "good enough idea to post" - I'm not sure why adding facts to a discussion about Bitcoin wouldn't be a good idea.
He never claimed that the serious miners were making money. His point was that Bitcoin mining wasn't really a distributed operation any longer - at least not in the sense of everybody and their uncle doing it with 10% of their spare CPU capacity.
I won't disagree that trying to make money by mining Bitcoin doesn't make sense right now, because there is far more supply of mining than there is demand for it. If at some point the value settles down and it actually gets used in some significant volume of commerce then there would be a steady demand for mining, and it would be possible to make a very modest profit for mining once all the enthusiasm dies out. As you say, right now there is a gold rush which has created a bubble.
Bitcoin was never designed to give out free money to miners. They're a necessary part of the operation of the system, but as their supply goes up so does the difficulty level and the value of transaction costs right now is low since there aren't many transactions and half the miners will bless transactions for free.
The concentration of mining operations is a real problem for the protocol.
Well, maybe.
Nothing stops somebody running a big mining collective from taking some of the hashes they discover and submitting them under an anonymous ID and then just throwing away the bitcoins they receive for that one transaction.
The mining collectives brag about their results and of course they want to profit from the bitcoins, so they do it under their own name now.
Also, it doesn't have to be one big org - it could be a conspiracy between the operators of a few pools that add up to 51%. Those who run the orgs don't necessarily need to know about it either - would the board of some mining company notice if a few of their hashes weren't cashed in?
One would assume that the thousands of other miners, if it was really that important to them, could easily step up their collective games and provide more hashing power than ghash can...
I wouldn't assume this at all. Back when everybody was mining with CPUs then a popular appeal might get people to donate a ton of unused CPU capacity to beating a big miner.
However, today mining is done with ASICs which are many orders of magnitude faster than any CPU you can buy. An Intel CPU might mine 10-20 Mhash/s, and and ASIC stats are measured in high GH/s to the low TH/s. So, you'd need 100,000 CPUs dedicated to mining to equal a single ASIC unit.
The current hash rate is 100 PH/s having doubled in the last two months, or the equivalent of 10 billion Intel CPUs. Are there even 10 billion modern Intel CPUs in existence? You'd probably need $100M to just buy that many ASICs (if I didn't miscount my zeros), which gives you a sense of the scale of Bitcoin mining today. That mining collective operates about $50M worth of hardware, though I guess controlling an entire currency for a $50M investment isn't bad.
It is a bit like saying that if it was really important people could team up in neighborhoods and produce cars, and the collective might of the entire US population could outproduce the big 3 car manufacturers. The problem is that an optimized robot-assisted assembly line can churn out a LOT of cars, and building one by hand in a garage takes a very long time even setting aside the logistics nightmare which isn't much better when you're making one car vs a million of them. 10k workers in a factory could very well produce more cars than the entire rest of the population working at home combined.
We've known this for decades. What I can't figure out is why a pertussis only booster hasn't been marketed. We have the vaccine, we have much of the data. It would be fairly easy to do. (Insert favorite rant about the Medical Industrial Complex here.)
Unless there is sufficient clinical data on adults to justify an FDA approval on the booster it will cost probably $100M to develop one. Granted, by drug standards it isn't a big deal because the risk of failure would be pretty low. Still, a company would have to believe that they're going to sell a fair number of boosters to justify the expenditure, and the ongoing manufacturing costs.
The thing is, adults don't tend to get vaccinated like kids do, and there is no school forcing them to get vaccinated or fill out an exemption form.
It is the classic vaccine problem - until adults start getting sick often enough to be concerned about the disease, there won't be much of a market for the vaccine.
Good advice. An even bigger problem is when people report allergies to antibiotics that they aren't really allergic to (granted, doctors who are afraid of being sued and don't bother to confirm this don't help). If you report 10 antibiotic allergies to the doctor and end up in the hospital with sepsis for some reason, you may very well die from it. They're going to treat you with antibiotics that are rarely used because they don't work well and have nasty side-effects that will hit you hard while you're already weak, but they can't treat you with any of the stuff that is more appropriate because you reported allergies and they don't want to risk it while you're already ill.
So, if you think you're allergic to multiple classes of antibiotics do yourself a favor and talk to a doctor who will help you to confirm whether this is in fact the case. That knowledge just might save your life when you're in bad shape and the doctor knows how to treat you.
I haven't counted calories at all, so from an objective sense, I can't give precise amount of wha I used to eat compared to what I eat now.
I've tried both balanced calorie-counting diets and LCHF diets. I can vouch that the latter works FAR better.
I was able to lose weight on a balanced diet, and being a chemist who is a bit OCD I measured EVERYTHING that went into my mouth. What I will tell you is that while I did lose weight, I was always hungry. I was eating six small meals a day and while I was sitting at my desk at work I'd always be looking over to my bag of food just willing the clock to move so that I could eat my next meal. In the end I just couldn't do it any longer, and I regained the weight I had lost.
On the other hand, I've been on a LCHF diet for a year now. I can't say that my weight is as low as I want it to be, but I'm 50 pounds lighter than I was a year ago, and I'm lighter than I ever was on the balanced diet. Last night my wife ordered a cheesecake for desert and while I did taste a slight sliver of it I really didn't have any issues with watching her eat the bulk of it. If anything it tasted too sweet to me - when I do make low-carb treats (which I avoid mostly now) I often go easy on the sweeteners.
Being a fairly OCD person I'm probably fairly susceptible to addictive behaviors, and I think that part of the reason LCHF works for me is that it basically takes much of the pleasure out of eating. When I was in a bad mood I used to grab some ice cream or whatever in the past. Now I find something else to do or just deal with it. That lack of serotonin boost from sugar gets you out of that reinforcement loop when you eat.
From what I've read a lot of the pharmaceutical attempts to come up with diet drugs have failed due to side-effects of suicide. I wonder if that is due to the link to serotonin/etc. I think part of the problem with overeating is that it just makes you feel good when you do it, so people do it. If drugs get rid of the pleasure they'll break that conditioning cycle, but on the other hand if eating a pint of Ben and Jerry's doesn't cheer you up after a breakup maybe you're more likely to jump off of a bridge instead. It really makes you think about the neurology of depression.
In any case, the solution to such problems obviously isn't to keep eating food that puts you at risk for diabetes/etc.
I can't believe I haven't heard of this approach until now. That could really help to solve the problem with prefixes changing due to dynamic assignment. Basically each device can have both a globally routable address (which changes often), and a local address (which never changes).
Alas, this still means that I can't use the same DNS on the inside and outside of the network. It also means that I still have to deal with dynamic DNS updates for multiple hosts if I want them to have globally-reachable addresses.
It doesn't help that IPv6 doesn't play nicely with dynamic address assignment, which is of course how ISPs generally hand out addresses to home users. If you aren't using NAT (which has all the usual problems) then anytime your IP prefix changes all the devices in your house have to change addresses. So, no more mapping a network printer using just its IP, and I've yet to see a DNS implementation that easily handles IPv6 prefix changes.
Uh, you do realize that the thing that keeps the su app from being exploited is the very same sandboxing written by Google that keeps apps from exploiting each other in general, right?
UH, sandbox is only one of many possible attack vectors to compromise an app. what if it simply had a back door? have you inspected the source?
Thanks for pointing that out - I actually didn't realize SuperSU wasn't open source. Fortunately there are open source alternatives, like superuser.
And no, I don't plan to look at the source before I install it. Ditto for the linux kernel running on the phone, and the openssl library on my webserver. :)
How is trusting that SuperSU doesn't have bugs any different from trusting that the Linux kernel has zero bugs?
it's a matter of attack vectors. using SuperSU adds one more.
also, i'm willing to bet that the linux kernel gets a little more scrutiny and testing than your SU app. then again, it's much more code.
Sure, but we're talking about a very simple implementation. I guess having it is more risky than not having it, but on the other hand the alternative seems to be basically giving every app on your phone access to all your personal info, in which case I'm not sure what you're avoiding by not just giving them all root as well.
The actual su application is sandboxed by the OS like every other app. Again, if that doesn't work then you're already up the creek.
I do understand your point, but I honestly my concern with having SuperSU on my phone is just a bit lower than my concern with the fact that I've yet to see a browser that gives you a warning anytime you make an unauthenticated connection.
Well, if that is your concern the states already own everything from helicopters to tanks via the "National Guard" which is basically the militia.
However, the states aren't really organized to fight as independent units. Nor are they designed to be able to oppose the Federal Government. If for some reason the Pentagon decided to wage war on Kansas, the first sign the Kansas governor would have of it would be all his national guard bases being turned into parking lots, and then he is down to whatever small arms are secured in police stations. Good luck using those when the tanks and helicopters come rolling in.
If you really want states to be able to oppose the Federal Government then they'll need independent supply lines, secrecy from the Federal Government, and a budget the size of the US DoD budget. Oh, and you'll need to have some kind of operational framework where the states can all pick sides on short notice and properly coordinate with those on their side while killing everybody in the states that aren't in their site. Oh, for best results the states should have independent nuclear arsenals. Of course, if you're going to do that you might as well just have the Federal Government nuke everybody in the US since that will be about the same result as a modern civil war, and it will be way cheaper since we already have enough nukes to kill ourselves without having to quadruple our defense budget on multiple armies designed to fight each other.
Since WWII warfare has escalated to a point where first-world nations just can't engage in it against anybody other than third world nations. Could you imagine the results if the US/Russia went to war over Crimea? Conventionally I'd be inclined to think that Russia couldn't really stop an invasion force assuming they could all make it to the border with their supplies, but they certainly could sink ships and generally wreak havoc on strategic interests, and if it got to nuclear war then we've basically decided that instead of playing video games and debating on Slashdot we felt it was better to get into a huff over who administers a peninsula and give up anything more than subsistence farming/hunting for the next 3 generations or so.
no. it's the difference between a brick wall and a brick wall with a locked door in it. if you really don't want anyone to get in, you don't put a door in the first place, because a door has a locked that can be picked.
Well, more like a brick wall with 30,000 locked doors, and a brick wall with 30,012 locked doors. A modern OS has TONS of places that need to be secure to prevent a privilege escalation.
your "su" app is just software and is subject to bugs like any other. i love it how people don't trust google, but they trust the guy who wrote an "su" app in his mom's basement.
Uh, you do realize that the thing that keeps the su app from being exploited is the very same sandboxing written by Google that keeps apps from exploiting each other in general, right?
that's great, as long as you trust that SuperSU has zero bugs.
it's the difference between having a brick wall, and having a brick wall with a locked door. if you absolutely don't want people to get in, don't build a door in the first place.
How is trusting that SuperSU doesn't have bugs any different from trusting that the Linux kernel has zero bugs? I'm not aware of any privilege escalation bugs for SuperSU. I'm certainly aware that there have been many of them over the years for the Linux kernel.
Sure, having SuperSU installed is another place an attack can be made, but it is just one of MANY that already exist. The doors are already all over the place. Just about every android device out there can be rooted, despite the fact that very few of them are designed to be - those are all privilege escalation bugs of one sort or another, and none of those phones start out with SuperSU on them.
The sad truth about the travesty of Gitmo is that it was attempted to be closed but was blocked via procedural means.
Just set up a court and hold criminal trials. Try them in gitmo if you have to. Then they're either guilty or innocent.
Nobody objects to people being held in gitmo because the prison happens to be located at gitmo. The concern is that people are being held prisoner without any kind of trial or determination of guilt. Simply moving them around doesn't solve that.
Hold a trial, and if they're innocent you let them go. If the evil Republicans or whatever won't fund flying them home then just let them out at the gate of the army base and they can figure out what to go do with themselves. I can't imagine that Castro will want to keep them.
You can blame the Republicans all you want, but we already have an extra-constitutional prison that has a history of torturing prisoners. Does anybody really care if the president just ignores a congressional resolution denying funding for transferring prisoners? Presidents have been ignoring laws they don't like for the last decade. What are the republicans going to do about it - try to impeach another president?
If we're going to get into a big fuss over following the Constitution maybe we can start with giving people due process and obtaining warrants before you intercept every electronic communication on the planet.
No, it is not a moral judgement. You currently have no right to vote for representatives in other states and districts. And based on the design of the system, no such right is justified on any grounds.
The design of the system is what it is. It doesn't "justify" anything. However, nobody is going and voting in other districts. They're just spending billions of dollars to get the idiots who live there to vote differently.
The Constitution also doesn't establish a representative democracy where you aren't allowed by law to tamper with elections in other districts.
The US Constitution does not specify how states elect their representation, but the state constitutions do, and the US Constitution does not override them. Keep trying.
Ok, fine - you're being pedantic. The state constitutions ALSO don't establish a representative democracy where you aren't allowed by law to tamper with elections in other districts.
If I donate $1B to the opponent of your favorite representative, chances are that he will win the election, and I probably don't live anywhere near you.
So, if you want to argue that anything allowed by law is just fine, then you're going to let those populous states pick your representatives, because your neighbors are too dumb to vote for anybody other than the guy who sounds good on TV, and those big states donate far more to campaigns than you do. :)
If you want everyone's interests properly represented, you have to take the internal structure of the country into account. Otherwise you end up in a situation where only people living in the most populous areas get their voice heard, and the rest get screwed constantly.
How are they screwed? They get the exact same benefits as the folks in the populous areas. They just don't get a disproportionate number of votes.
Why does it make sense that the 38M voters in California get the same two votes in the Senate as the 1M voters in Rhode Island?
Uh, you do realize that root exists on the phone whether it is rooted or not, right?
please take a non-rooted phone and try to obtain root permissions. you can't. so no, apps absolutely cannot obtain root permissions on a non-rooted device.
Sure they can - there just has to be a local priv exploit. That's also the only way an app can get root permissions on a rooted device, unless you grant it to the app.
There isn't anything inherently insecure about a rooted device. Now, if you just grant access to su to any application that asks for it, then that is insecure.
However, the whole point of this article is that the Android OS will happily give away your IMEI, serial number, phone number, contact info, all the files on your sdcard, and whatever else an app asks for. So, unless you don't want to use the Facebook app, you're far better off rooting it to install XPrivacy than to leave it alone.