I assume that it's a requirement that the coin be horribly hard to duplicate exactly. The source would be a real help with such forgery. That said, forging even the most complicated coins to a 'passable' standard does not seem to be too hard.
you may be right; but £125k would still be 5x and frankly I don't believe there is anywhere left in the UK where even the smallest bedsit goes for that little.
Nation-wide, house prices above about 3x the median hosehold income aren't sustainable.
We're in trouble over in the UK then; median income is £24,700[1], average house price is £219,262[2], so we're over 9x.
But house prices will never fall more than 10-15%.
Our key voting demographic own their homes already (bought at 3x-6x), and the 4 year politicians will be replaced a couple of times before the current 18-35 demographic start voting enough. The current strategy of preventing more than 1/10 of required housing being built will mean we've gone from "least space per person in Europe" to "less space per person than a first choice aeroplane" - but the house prices will stay up at 8x-9x or higher.
Nobody uses all the features. Modern phones are like desktop computers. Sure everyone* uses the phone bit, like everyone uses a browser on a desktop, but there is nobody that has a use for every possible option.
I'm a geek and I use my phone's advanced features, browser, camera, gps, and podcast syncing all the time and there is still a bunch of stuff i don't use. photo editing apps, code memos, ringtone composers, all useless to me.
Remember when we used to mock old people for the blinking 12:00 on their VCR? Well now virtually the whole population has some kind of blinking 12:00 problem in their life. Cars, computers, phones and other gadgets are particularly at fault, but it happens with anything remotely complex. I can do pretty much anything with a computer but I can't make my washing machine do I want.
Good engineering (including software) makes it possible for people to use stuff they don't understand.
It also makes it possible for almost every corporation to run large numbers of computers, despite the lack of people who really understand them - you can look at incompetent IT managers as a software success story:)
Go inside the congestion charging zone in central London. It's like a couple of square miles of R&D lab, electric and hybrid vehicles of all sorts. All the major courier companies are trying out electric vans there plus bottled water delivery and so on, plus loads of those silly little two seater plug in electrics.
The difference with games is that you've not got millions of devices would play the game, but for DRM.
Those millions of cheap MP3-playing portables, car radios, mobile phones, dvd players and high end washing machines are all votes against DRM in the normal consumer mind.
In fact, I'm no gadget freak, yet I own 5 or more things that play mp3s for every one thing that will play DRM music. So DRM just got outvoted.
Some issues are fabulous at this. I've got a copy of 5.08 sitting here, the front cover of which suggests Linux is dying, Gary Reback will take down Microsoft, and internet 'malls' are the future. My favourite line is 'Linux might become just another honest freeware Mosaic wiped out by a slick commercial Netscape'...
I've got a copy of the one that celebrates the coming of the 'push' internet somewhere too.
In hindsight, 30 miles was a silly figure. My office is actually in the square mile, so walking distance is probably out, but 10 miles ought to bring it under 1 million usd. still not affordable though!
Our public transport is OK, not great, but it costs $15/day and takes 45 mins on the train, compared with $35 fuel, $15 congestion charge and $25 parking to drive - for 1 hour 50 mins.
(And the housing beyond insane - you could not buy a home of any sort for less than $1 million within 30 miles of my office)
You will get this eventually in your big US cities. LA is the size of London, and starting to run of space to build 10 lane highways. New York is probably already like it.
It's only a month since Poole council hit the headlines for using RIPA to spy on families to check school applications[1] - council employees were literally following people around and sitting outside their houses. Not only is this explicitly legal, but they were prepared to go on record saying they considered it to be a normal desirable practice. There will be a lot more of this.
The Tories want to get rid of the 'paperwork' of RIPA[2] too, which basically means eliminating those awkward checks and balances so they can get on with real spying in peace (that's how I read it anyway).
On the bright side, the police hate RIPA[2] as it is, so at least its due for some more headlines first
I don't know why, but this question sounds really, really weird to me: if you are doing.NET development, why move to Mono and Linux? Why not just stay under Windows, especially since you say (and I quote):
I dont know a lot about Linux, so I thought I would ask if there is already something like this available. I can answer this, being in much the same postion.
Like a lot of Slashdotters, I get paid for coding, and so I use C# and.NET at work, but I love my Ubuntu setup at home. Mono lets me use a language I am comfortable in for pet projects.
Linux is perfect target environment for the kind of (ambitious) pet project he has in mind, it's far more suitable than Windows for repurposing older kit or scratch building, it has no cost or licensing hassles, drivers are built in, and everything is open.
Of course the same thing means Mono might well be a problem for Microsoft. While developers like us might get paid for running XP + VS 2008, it does't take us much extra coding to deploy to Linux and Mono, and, unlike desktops, the kit that does the databases, web services and ASP.NET hosting doesn't have bundled Windows licenses. In fact, Windows server is a 450 quid option on a 500 quid server. That kind of margin pays for quite a few hours testing.
Its just another cashback site, but linked to a search engine. Ergo, it will not pay out until the retailer notifies them of the sale and pays the cash. And the retailer will only pay if they ship to a US address.
Also note that MS has a lot less incentive to pay out than all the other cashback sites, because cashback is not their core product and reputation will matter much less too.
Sure I like the fact that all the software on my computer cost me nothing. And I like the fact that my contributions have helped others out, not just been swallowed and ignore by a faceless corporation.
But I also like the fact that I just added 3 useful new features to my router. I like being effortlessly sure all my software has the latest security patches. I like the fact I can get everything I need to outfit my PC and my friends PCs and be sure I'm strictly legal without reading lots of fine print. None of those things are possible with commercial software.
All very well if you don't live in a 'problem area'. Random house searches based on your post code is not nice.
I agree handguns are not really dual use though. A better example would be 4x4s (SUVs). One of them was recently used to ram-raid a post office near me. There could be an argument made that only farmers etc really need a 4x4, and the rest of us could cope with ford fiestas.
This is nothing new. Historically, governments of all major industrial industrial countries have been willing to sell the future health of the country in the name of economic progress. You don't have to go back to the industrial revolution either - 50 years ago, tens of thousands of people were dying every year from atmospheric pollution in London, in the name of economic progress. 40 years ago heavy metal poisoning in Japan was killing and maiming thousands. Most modern environmental laws in 'western' countries didn't start coming in to place until the 70s and 80s. Hopefully the massive hydro projects, the green wall, and they Olympic clean up operation are glimpses of the future China, and the coal fired, PCB burning peaceful rise will go into the history books next to New York sweatshops and the impact of the British empire.
Imagine if somebody did this but used it to steal hundreds of thousands of XP / Vista serial numbers, then a few weeks later published them on the net.
With any luck, Microsoft would revoke the keys, and hundreds of thousands of end users would get a short sharp lesson in computer security and the wisdom of trusting your data to a computer controlled by a large company.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that it's a requirement that the coin be horribly hard to duplicate exactly. The source would be a real help with such forgery. That said, forging even the most complicated coins to a 'passable' standard does not seem to be too hard.
Works for me (London E1)
Perhaps you're behind a content filter? Or have the wrong address? Try this:
http://www.truecrypt.org
you may be right; but £125k would still be 5x and frankly I don't believe there is anywhere left in the UK where even the smallest bedsit goes for that little.
Nation-wide, house prices above about 3x the median hosehold income aren't sustainable.
We're in trouble over in the UK then; median income is £24,700[1], average house price is £219,262[2], so we're over 9x.
But house prices will never fall more than 10-15%.
Our key voting demographic own their homes already (bought at 3x-6x), and the 4 year politicians will be replaced a couple of times before the current 18-35 demographic start voting enough. The current strategy of preventing more than 1/10 of required housing being built will mean we've gone from "least space per person in Europe" to "less space per person than a first choice aeroplane" - but the house prices will stay up at 8x-9x or higher.
[1]http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo060719/text/60719w1831.htm
[2]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/uk_house_prices/html/houses.stm
Nobody uses all the features. Modern phones are like desktop computers. Sure everyone* uses the phone bit, like everyone uses a browser on a desktop, but there is nobody that has a use for every possible option.
I'm a geek and I use my phone's advanced features, browser, camera, gps, and podcast syncing all the time and there is still a bunch of stuff i don't use. photo editing apps, code memos, ringtone composers, all useless to me.
*nearly everyone
This is the bottom of the singularity curve.
Remember when we used to mock old people for the blinking 12:00 on their VCR? Well now virtually the whole population has some kind of blinking 12:00 problem in their life. Cars, computers, phones and other gadgets are particularly at fault, but it happens with anything remotely complex. I can do pretty much anything with a computer but I can't make my washing machine do I want.
Good engineering (including software) makes it possible for people to use stuff they don't understand.
It also makes it possible for almost every corporation to run large numbers of computers, despite the lack of people who really understand them - you can look at incompetent IT managers as a software success story :)
It's essential for our national security to stretch the word terrorism to encompass anything you wish terrorism laws to be used for.
By the time all this charade and the ecocrap has filtered down a bit, we're gonna be looking at air travel as 20th century oddity
Go inside the congestion charging zone in central London. It's like a couple of square miles of R&D lab, electric and hybrid vehicles of all sorts. All the major courier companies are trying out electric vans there plus bottled water delivery and so on, plus loads of those silly little two seater plug in electrics.
software maps exactly to buildings, if you scale it up by a couple of orders of magnitude.
You get builders who construct garden sheds/shanty towns that would fall apart in a year or less and comparable software products that barely run.
And then you get occasional code build to last through decades of abuse, which might stand alongside ancient cathedrals and so on.
Big just-good-enough software corporations have a lot in common with modern house and office builders and architects.
The difference with games is that you've not got millions of devices would play the game, but for DRM.
Those millions of cheap MP3-playing portables, car radios, mobile phones, dvd players and high end washing machines are all votes against DRM in the normal consumer mind.
In fact, I'm no gadget freak, yet I own 5 or more things that play mp3s for every one thing that will play DRM music. So DRM just got outvoted.
Its possible that Google could be considered to be doing business in the EU and exporting data abroad.
In which case, they could fined in much the same way MS was.
Some issues are fabulous at this. I've got a copy of 5.08 sitting here, the front cover of which suggests Linux is dying, Gary Reback will take down Microsoft, and internet 'malls' are the future. My favourite line is 'Linux might become just another honest freeware Mosaic wiped out by a slick commercial Netscape'...
I've got a copy of the one that celebrates the coming of the 'push' internet somewhere too.
In this case, the end user does not care who is publishing the material, only that nobody listens.
It's more like a random stranger has offered to send you money either in the bulletproof truck, or slung in the back of a pickup.
Don't try this! - your voicemail could use 3 for immediate delete.
3 is delete on all UK landlines, using the 1571 voicemail anyway, and the voicemail on most, maybe all, UK mobile carriers.
In hindsight, 30 miles was a silly figure. My office is actually in the square mile, so walking distance is probably out, but 10 miles ought to bring it under 1 million usd. still not affordable though!
I work in London, UK. Gas is $10 a gallon.
Our public transport is OK, not great, but it costs $15/day and takes 45 mins on the train, compared with $35 fuel, $15 congestion charge and $25 parking to drive - for 1 hour 50 mins.
(And the housing beyond insane - you could not buy a home of any sort for less than $1 million within 30 miles of my office)
You will get this eventually in your big US cities. LA is the size of London, and starting to run of space to build 10 lane highways. New York is probably already like it.
It's only a month since Poole council hit the headlines for using RIPA to spy on families to check school applications[1] - council employees were literally following people around and sitting outside their houses. Not only is this explicitly legal, but they were prepared to go on record saying they considered it to be a normal desirable practice. There will be a lot more of this.
The Tories want to get rid of the 'paperwork' of RIPA[2] too, which basically means eliminating those awkward checks and balances so they can get on with real spying in peace (that's how I read it anyway).
On the bright side, the police hate RIPA[2] as it is, so at least its due for some more headlines first
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/7341179.stm & http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584713/Poole-council-spies-on-family-over-school-claim.html
2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/02/03/do0301.xml
3. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/08/flanagan_ripa/
I dont know a lot about Linux, so I thought I would ask if there is already something like this available. I can answer this, being in much the same postion.
Like a lot of Slashdotters, I get paid for coding, and so I use C# and
Linux is perfect target environment for the kind of (ambitious) pet project he has in mind, it's far more suitable than Windows for repurposing older kit or scratch building, it has no cost or licensing hassles, drivers are built in, and everything is open.
Of course the same thing means Mono might well be a problem for Microsoft. While developers like us might get paid for running XP + VS 2008, it does't take us much extra coding to deploy to Linux and Mono, and, unlike desktops, the kit that does the databases, web services and ASP.NET hosting doesn't have bundled Windows licenses. In fact, Windows server is a 450 quid option on a 500 quid server. That kind of margin pays for quite a few hours testing.
Its just another cashback site, but linked to a search engine. Ergo, it will not pay out until the retailer notifies them of the sale and pays the cash. And the retailer will only pay if they ship to a US address.
Also note that MS has a lot less incentive to pay out than all the other cashback sites, because cashback is not their core product and reputation will matter much less too.
Whereas Charles Stross will be thrilled to know we've got an export market for Scorpion Stare...
Sure I like the fact that all the software on my computer cost me nothing. And I like the fact that my contributions have helped others out, not just been swallowed and ignore by a faceless corporation.
But I also like the fact that I just added 3 useful new features to my router. I like being effortlessly sure all my software has the latest security patches. I like the fact I can get everything I need to outfit my PC and my friends PCs and be sure I'm strictly legal without reading lots of fine print. None of those things are possible with commercial software.
All very well if you don't live in a 'problem area'. Random house searches based on your post code is not nice.
I agree handguns are not really dual use though. A better example would be 4x4s (SUVs). One of them was recently used to ram-raid a post office near me. There could be an argument made that only farmers etc really need a 4x4, and the rest of us could cope with ford fiestas.
This is nothing new. Historically, governments of all major industrial industrial countries have been willing to sell the future health of the country in the name of economic progress. You don't have to go back to the industrial revolution either - 50 years ago, tens of thousands of people were dying every year from atmospheric pollution in London, in the name of economic progress. 40 years ago heavy metal poisoning in Japan was killing and maiming thousands.
Most modern environmental laws in 'western' countries didn't start coming in to place until the 70s and 80s. Hopefully the massive hydro projects, the green wall, and they Olympic clean up operation are glimpses of the future China, and the coal fired, PCB burning peaceful rise will go into the history books next to New York sweatshops and the impact of the British empire.
Imagine if somebody did this but used it to steal hundreds of thousands of XP / Vista serial numbers, then a few weeks later published them on the net.
With any luck, Microsoft would revoke the keys, and hundreds of thousands of end users would get a short sharp lesson in computer security and the wisdom of trusting your data to a computer controlled by a large company.
Plus the botnet would take a bit of a blow.