Several reasons:
- It is designed for rewarding early investors. It even has a built-in diminishing return per investment.
- The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them.
- You're encouraged to find new investors in order to drive up the value of your (meager) holdings (and the substantial holdings of early players).
- Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments.
I'm as nerdy and liberal as they come, which is exactly why I see this for what it is.
BTC isn't dependent on "an influx of new investors"; it's simply enough for the existing investors to hold currency for it to retain value. This by itself indicates it's not a pyramid scheme.
The remaining bullet points are all true for ANY investment - that doesn't make BTC a pyramid scheme. However, there's no underlying equity or real estate, which makes it pure speculation. But speculation doesn't imply pyramid scheme, except in a sort of leftie-liberal anti-capitalist polemic sense. But in a discourse where words have meanings it's not a pyramid scheme.
When in Sweden he should ask the police for advice himself. Tell them he was asked to provide sexual services in return for lodging, that this wasn't discussed in advance, and at 3am he didn't feel he had too many options other than put up with it. He was tired and not familiar with the area or country even. He should ask the police if he was sexually exploited or the victim of any other crime.
The raiding is fine and the mechanics (for most fights) aren't really that hard if you have a competent guild.
Unfortunately, competent guilds don't grow on trees. And the ones that are tend not to have too many spots open. So you have a choice of playing with <Team Fail>, or <Relive Old World Glories>, or getting bossed around and maybe play once a month. Or when there's a spot you're not geared because you didn't get to play any of the previous content. On top of that you have to listen to the inanities on Vent of people you'd never spend time with for any other reason. The whole guild system, or rather its necessity, is the core problem of WoW and why I personally quit playing shortly after Cata.
If you are born athletic, you are more likely to spend effort on physical activities because it will provide you the most immediate payoff. And if you are born with higher intelligence, you will spend more time reading books.
I think you may find that professional athletes are generally quite intelligent, because once you get high enough up the scale the human performance plateaus and intelligence becomes the key differentiator. And there are enough at or near the plateau that intelligence is pretty much mandatory. But they tend to be smart about other things, like physical awareness, recognizing weaknesses in themselves and competitors, figuring out ways to take advantage of opportunities, and training (which largely is about mental conditioning when you're already at the peak of human performance).
Of course, you may also be surprised to find that people who are very good at abstract reasoning also tend to be reasonably fit. They realize they exist in a physical shell, the experience and behavior of which impacts every second of their life. A well-performing body makes for a more pleasant existence, which makes thinking easier than if constantly distracted by little things like having to walk a couple of blocks because of lack of parking. Activities like running, cycling, or lap swimming are also good opportunities to think. And training can be pretty geeky in itself, once you get into PowerTaps, Garmin Edges, and ForeRunners.
Don't ever work for stock options. It's okay to get some as a bonus as part of a compensation package, but basically you don't have control over options and no rights. If you work for equity in lieu of a wage, then you want stock, not options. If you leave the company there are a million ways for them to screw you over, leaving you without compensation for the months or years you invested. You own nothing. It's just plain idiotic to accept stock options as your primary compensation. (And founders who offer it are either clueless or try to rip you off. Regardless, RUN don't walk.)
What a very sad state we are. The whole healthcare reform bill ended up "costing", what, around 1 Trillion dollars? And what was it supposed to accomplish? I see, well, when people are resorting to crime to get healthcare I would say the reform act got it wrong. Seriously, for 1 Trillion the government could have just bought insurance policies for 100 million people.
Rush Limbaugh clearly labels his shows "for entertainment purposes only". You're not SUPPOSED to take it seriously. He makes stuff up. It's fiction. Not real. There is no trillion dollar cost.
I'm not asking as a percentage of GDP, I'm asking per-person.
Back of the envelope:
160,000,000,000 / (population of GBR) = $2585 per year, per person. On average, UK people pay an extra $200 or so per month in taxes for their health care.
No, the total expense is $200/mo per person. That includes private insurance, country-club detox for pop stars, sports medicine for footballers, plastic surgery for their wives, etc.
If you're homeless, you probably qualify for Medicaid.
Homeless doesn't matter, other than no state agency will touch you if you can't show you're a resident. Such as a utility bill in your name. What matters for eligibility, mainly, is if you have children or whether you're employed (working poor). https://www.cms.gov/MedicaidEligibility/02_AreYouEligible_.asp
Medicaid doesn't pay for uninsured people who show up at the ER. Instead the hospital tacks it on to its general cost structure, which gets passed on to those insured. So the insurance rates paid already reflect the uninsured.
I assume you're talking health INSURANCE. Not healthcare. Because anyone, legal us citizen or not, can receive healthcare at the ER.
This though isn't going to provide you with statins if your blood pressure is high, checkups or monitoring following a stroke or heart attack, insulin, or anything else that is actually useful in keeping you healthy and out of the ER. Even a prison doctor can provide those things.
Oh, if only you could see all the Internet Libertarians in #bitcoin talking about how it's all the users' fault for not forseeing that the website would get hacked and using passwords strong enough to stand up against being brute-forced from their hashes.
Yeah, well they always had the choice to create their own exchange but chose to rely on someone else's.
Re:Bitcoin to revolutionise economy
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
OK, lets say there is only a single gold coin in town. That's the only currency in existence. OK so far? So, I have that one coin, and I pay somebody that coin for a new window. The glassier takes that coin, and he goes to the pub and he buys a beer for that one coin. Now the bar pays the bartender with that one coin. Now he takes that coin and he buys a sandwich with that coin. Oops, so far our town as a GDP of 4 coins, but there's only one in existence. DO YOU UNDERSTAND YET THAT AN ECONOMY IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME? I know, you should use the broken window fallacy next! Point out that if you hadn't broken my window in that above example that the GDP of my fictional town would have been 0 instead of 4!;)
To take this further, assume my company sells your company a piece of paper for $1M. You then sell me a piece of paper for $1M. All that has happened is that two pieces of paper changed hands, but economically we've produced $2M of GDP (= total value of goods and services produced, not total amount). No gold coin needed at all. If there's a 1000 of us buying and selling each others' pieces of paper we will have produced $ billions. No currency involved. It's also why an economy can grow without increasing production - there's simply an increase in demand for what it produces. More specifically, an economy that's more effective at meeting needs instead blanketing producing every conceivable product and service can have the same or bigger GDP while producing significantly less.
We already have freely elected governments in the west and don't need stunts like this for legitimacy. If we disapprove of our politicians we replace them the next elections. If I were a Chinese party official I'd be very concerned over this: what if people get a taste for democracy and start demanding more of it?
Of course, if you have incriminating evidence on your phone/server then privacy won't help much if law enforcement shows up with a search warrant. It's easier to obey laws in the first place to void this particular problem.
It's still useful as a checksum algorithm. I use it on my photos to determine if software has messed with the metadata. Clearly we're not talking about a security application here.
You may as well use CRC32, though, which is just as useful for that application and much, much cheaper to compute.
I'd use Adler-32; much simpler than CRC32 (which really is a PITA to implement correctly) and about twice as fast as the most optimized CRC32, while plenty good to thumbmark files. Rsync uses it, for instance. CRC16/32 generally rules supreme for hardware though (shift registers are dirt cheap in hardware, but suck in software, leading to really complex, error-prone optimizations).
There are defences against that sort of attack too. For example, only permitting logins from a physically secured terminal. You can then tell your abductors the password, but they can't use it unless they also compromise the physical security.
It's much easier to have a second alarm password, that appears to give access but provides only fake data. When used it disables the real access and sets off alarms. Write it on an official looking card and keep it in your wallet; this way an abductor won't have to beat you to get it. Or it could provide access but set off alarms in a situation where it's hard to fake access and lives might be at stake. For a bank employee for instance it could notify police and the FBI, then make all operations so slow the criminals will have to sit around for half an hour to get anything done, permitting tracing and staging the local tactical squad.
Going from 10000000 cracking attempts per second to 10 cracking attempts per second is going to stop a lot of attacks, and all it takes is using a properly designed algorithm instead of just sticking the password and a salt into a hash (which is what SaltedHash does).
Store the number of iterations alongside the salt and hash. This way as computers get faster you can rehash your password database once a year by increasing the number of iterations.
If the Internet is going to be a theater of future conflicts, then isn't it sensible for *all* countries to have some aptitude in the area? Has the US sworn off having any "cyberwarriors" of its own? Or is there really going to be one set of rules for the US and another set of rules for the rest of the world?
All countries have them, at least any first and second world, and those in the third world with the resources. Clearly if you're going to attack a country you want to lead with a disruption of their infrastructure and media. It doesn't matter if you hit a refinery with a cruise missile or shut down its computers - the result is the same, and it'll serve the same purpose.
Yes, clearly those scientists that had to repeatedly prove smoking is unhealthy were acting on a liberal agenda. I've learned from Fox News that scientists only care about political agendas, not about promoting a better society or the common welfare of people.
But that is the liberal agenda! FOX News caters to people who don't give a shit about such things.
Well, I guess that touches one of the main misconceptions when it comes to interpretation of scientific work. "Common sense" is not a scientific argument. It lacks rigor. And more often than not, common sense is just plain wrong.
It's also unquantified and unexplored. We may think it's obvious that obese young men get married less (note: get married, not have fewer dates or are less liked by the opposite sex) - but this doesn't say anything about what the difference is. Is it 50%? 5%? 1%? 0.001%? The common sense also doesn't explore the background - is it because obese mean don't *want* to get married? Or because they *mainly* want to get married? Are they obese because they aren't as vain and feel trying to impress women is silly? Is religion a factor? Do women find obese men less attractive because of lowered social status (among other men in particular)? Are there upbringing and social factors? Economic? Etc. If you're a serious sociologist, then clearly these have to be major questions worthy of research.
I take it places like that assume their laws apply globally?
Well, ignoring countries that abduct people from other countries to try them locally (North Korea, Israel, etc), in this case the Thais arrested a Thai citizen.
Dmitry Sklyarov was not a U.S. citizen, yet he had the misfortune of travelling to the U.S., where he was immediately arrested, despite not breaking any crimes while in the U.S.
There are crimes that are covered by treaties - things states extradite individuals for. Then there are political crimes: espionage, political sedition, criticism of leaders, etc. These are explicitly excluded from extradition treaties. This Thai guy is arrested for a political crime. The U.S. doesn't grant visas to politically undesirable individuals - this is the proper way to handle it; don't let them enter to begin with. If you give them a visa, then you have pretty much approved of their person and can't really reasonably turn around and arrest them. For non-political crimes however, if they want to come visit by all means give them a visa, then have police wait to cuff them at the airport. Nothing wrong with that. Dmitry Sklyarov was not arrested for espionage or any other political crime, but as a suspect in a copyright/fraud case. He was given due process and a fair trial, and the court cleared him and he was free to go home or stay in the country as he saw fit (he had a visa after all). This is also the proper way to handle such things.
DS was accused of committing a crime against Adobe, an American company operating in American jurisdiction, hence because the victim is in American jurisdiction it's perfectly reasonable to try him here. But he could have been tried in Russia, too, had he violated a law there in the process.
The Thai king was in Thai jurisdiction when criticized, he is the victim of the crime, and hence it's perfectly reasonable that the accused be tried there. The U.S. would recognize it as a political crime and would never extradite, but the Thai may not view it as a political crime - a lack of distinction normally only found among dictatorships. What if he instead had broken into a Thai bank and looted the Thai king's assets? Would that not have been a crime? You think it's okay to victimize people just because there's a line on a map between you? The problem here isn't arresting people who were abroad when they committed a crime, but the political nature of the crime.
One more reason why functional programming matters. Many programs become trivial to parallelize when you avoid mutation and side-effects outside of limited, carefully-controlled contexts.
More specifically, the problem of parallel programming is the problem of structuring state for concurrent access. Everything else (the mechanics of locks etc) is trivial and mainly a typing exercise.
The reason this is difficult is that it's an optimization; normally when we optimize code we write the naive version first (or near-naive), then optimize it. We might change a hash table to a vector, memcpy() to a few lines of inline assembler for a particular target, hand code CRC/checksumming/RC4 in assembler, use a freelist instead of malloc for some particular data structure, etc. At some point the gains no longer outweigh the effort and we're done. With MT code however, you can't do this, because the very fact that it's going to run concurrently is going to affect the most high-level design. It needs to be made concurrent from the outset; there is no going back later and making just some critical path MT-hot. Since concurrency requires changes at the highest level, existing software is essentially going to need to be completely taken apart and put back together again. More or less a rewrite. And my experience is this frequently fails (programmers who can do this to large, complex bodies of software don't grow on trees). This is why it's hard - it's an optimization that needs to be done before there's anything to optimize. It affects pretty much every aspect of factoring. Not more complex necessarily, sometimes it's just different from what one might do at first glance.
In fact, writing MT-friendly software is a lot like writing portable software. It's really tough to do a good job on existing code (try porting a Windows program to OS X for instance, even though 90% of the code base might have nothing to do with Windows per se, it just uses Windows APIs to get work done). But factor out the platform-specific parts, like the presentation from the outset with an intent to one day port it, and it's perfectly doable. In a first iteration it might only have a UI for a single platform (a "sparse implementation") much like the first round of MT-hot code might run with a concurrency of 1 (because parts are stubbed or just skeletons, or implement the trivial case of a concurrency of one).
Erlang (and other functional, single-static-assignment languages) are perfect for parallel programming.
In that case you can restate the original question as "how do I implement an Erlang compiler and runtime?" If, indeed, Erlang embodies the most efficient way to solve all parallell programming problems. Which of course is absurd. Erlang is useless for implementing servers, kernels, runtimes, networking stacks, file systems, device drivers, VM systems, database servers, or anything else that actually makes a computer tick. It's simply an interface to an already-implemented computing system. It's good to excellent for some problem dmains, but not all domains, and certainly not the computing (system) domain itself. It's one solution to a particular computing domain problem. How well it performs depends on how it's implemented, which brings us back to the original question: how to learn to design and write MT-hot code on SMP hardware.
After watching that video, I am sick and tired of being referred to as a consumer, and not a customer. Unless we are in an economics lecture, or a corporate board room, I think it's truly impolite and frankly condescending to refer to someone that tries to make regular use of your goods and services as a consumer.
Totally agree. In addition, people who build things are producers, not consumers.
I would love to see Radio Shack get back to its DIY roots. This time around maybe they can sell Arduinos and 3D printers. Heck... people are already selling machines that are 3D printers and CNC milling machines put together. It doesn't get much better than that. I want one.
PCBs would be awesome. Upload the design and go pick up the boards a week later. They could get enough volume to bring prototype-run prices way down.
And sell essential tools, which includes things like reflow stations these days. And ribbon cable kits, tools and all.
Slashdot Mirror
Several reasons: - It is designed for rewarding early investors. It even has a built-in diminishing return per investment. - The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them. - You're encouraged to find new investors in order to drive up the value of your (meager) holdings (and the substantial holdings of early players). - Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments.
I'm as nerdy and liberal as they come, which is exactly why I see this for what it is.
BTC isn't dependent on "an influx of new investors"; it's simply enough for the existing investors to hold currency for it to retain value. This by itself indicates it's not a pyramid scheme.
The remaining bullet points are all true for ANY investment - that doesn't make BTC a pyramid scheme. However, there's no underlying equity or real estate, which makes it pure speculation. But speculation doesn't imply pyramid scheme, except in a sort of leftie-liberal anti-capitalist polemic sense. But in a discourse where words have meanings it's not a pyramid scheme.
When in Sweden he should ask the police for advice himself. Tell them he was asked to provide sexual services in return for lodging, that this wasn't discussed in advance, and at 3am he didn't feel he had too many options other than put up with it. He was tired and not familiar with the area or country even. He should ask the police if he was sexually exploited or the victim of any other crime.
The raiding is fine and the mechanics (for most fights) aren't really that hard if you have a competent guild.
Unfortunately, competent guilds don't grow on trees. And the ones that are tend not to have too many spots open. So you have a choice of playing with <Team Fail>, or <Relive Old World Glories>, or getting bossed around and maybe play once a month. Or when there's a spot you're not geared because you didn't get to play any of the previous content. On top of that you have to listen to the inanities on Vent of people you'd never spend time with for any other reason. The whole guild system, or rather its necessity, is the core problem of WoW and why I personally quit playing shortly after Cata.
If you are born athletic, you are more likely to spend effort on physical activities because it will provide you the most immediate payoff. And if you are born with higher intelligence, you will spend more time reading books.
I think you may find that professional athletes are generally quite intelligent, because once you get high enough up the scale the human performance plateaus and intelligence becomes the key differentiator. And there are enough at or near the plateau that intelligence is pretty much mandatory. But they tend to be smart about other things, like physical awareness, recognizing weaknesses in themselves and competitors, figuring out ways to take advantage of opportunities, and training (which largely is about mental conditioning when you're already at the peak of human performance).
Of course, you may also be surprised to find that people who are very good at abstract reasoning also tend to be reasonably fit. They realize they exist in a physical shell, the experience and behavior of which impacts every second of their life. A well-performing body makes for a more pleasant existence, which makes thinking easier than if constantly distracted by little things like having to walk a couple of blocks because of lack of parking. Activities like running, cycling, or lap swimming are also good opportunities to think. And training can be pretty geeky in itself, once you get into PowerTaps, Garmin Edges, and ForeRunners.
Don't ever work for stock options. It's okay to get some as a bonus as part of a compensation package, but basically you don't have control over options and no rights. If you work for equity in lieu of a wage, then you want stock, not options. If you leave the company there are a million ways for them to screw you over, leaving you without compensation for the months or years you invested. You own nothing. It's just plain idiotic to accept stock options as your primary compensation. (And founders who offer it are either clueless or try to rip you off. Regardless, RUN don't walk.)
What a very sad state we are. The whole healthcare reform bill ended up "costing", what, around 1 Trillion dollars? And what was it supposed to accomplish? I see, well, when people are resorting to crime to get healthcare I would say the reform act got it wrong. Seriously, for 1 Trillion the government could have just bought insurance policies for 100 million people.
Rush Limbaugh clearly labels his shows "for entertainment purposes only". You're not SUPPOSED to take it seriously. He makes stuff up. It's fiction. Not real. There is no trillion dollar cost.
I'm not asking as a percentage of GDP, I'm asking per-person.
Back of the envelope:
160,000,000,000 / (population of GBR) = $2585 per year, per person. On average, UK people pay an extra $200 or so per month in taxes for their health care.
No, the total expense is $200/mo per person. That includes private insurance, country-club detox for pop stars, sports medicine for footballers, plastic surgery for their wives, etc.
If you're homeless, you probably qualify for Medicaid.
Homeless doesn't matter, other than no state agency will touch you if you can't show you're a resident. Such as a utility bill in your name. What matters for eligibility, mainly, is if you have children or whether you're employed (working poor). https://www.cms.gov/MedicaidEligibility/02_AreYouEligible_.asp
Medicaid doesn't pay for uninsured people who show up at the ER. Instead the hospital tacks it on to its general cost structure, which gets passed on to those insured. So the insurance rates paid already reflect the uninsured.
I assume you're talking health INSURANCE. Not healthcare. Because anyone, legal us citizen or not, can receive healthcare at the ER.
This though isn't going to provide you with statins if your blood pressure is high, checkups or monitoring following a stroke or heart attack, insulin, or anything else that is actually useful in keeping you healthy and out of the ER. Even a prison doctor can provide those things.
Enough with this Bitcoin spam already. Bitcoin is stupid, unneccessary and irrelevant, we don't care for your fucking scam.
Actually, I think it's a pretty cool experiment. But I'd never sink real money into it.
Oh, if only you could see all the Internet Libertarians in #bitcoin talking about how it's all the users' fault for not forseeing that the website would get hacked and using passwords strong enough to stand up against being brute-forced from their hashes.
Yeah, well they always had the choice to create their own exchange but chose to rely on someone else's.
OK, lets say there is only a single gold coin in town. That's the only currency in existence. OK so far? So, I have that one coin, and I pay somebody that coin for a new window. The glassier takes that coin, and he goes to the pub and he buys a beer for that one coin. Now the bar pays the bartender with that one coin. Now he takes that coin and he buys a sandwich with that coin. Oops, so far our town as a GDP of 4 coins, but there's only one in existence. DO YOU UNDERSTAND YET THAT AN ECONOMY IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME? I know, you should use the broken window fallacy next! Point out that if you hadn't broken my window in that above example that the GDP of my fictional town would have been 0 instead of 4! ;)
To take this further, assume my company sells your company a piece of paper for $1M. You then sell me a piece of paper for $1M. All that has happened is that two pieces of paper changed hands, but economically we've produced $2M of GDP (= total value of goods and services produced, not total amount). No gold coin needed at all. If there's a 1000 of us buying and selling each others' pieces of paper we will have produced $ billions. No currency involved. It's also why an economy can grow without increasing production - there's simply an increase in demand for what it produces. More specifically, an economy that's more effective at meeting needs instead blanketing producing every conceivable product and service can have the same or bigger GDP while producing significantly less.
We already have freely elected governments in the west and don't need stunts like this for legitimacy. If we disapprove of our politicians we replace them the next elections. If I were a Chinese party official I'd be very concerned over this: what if people get a taste for democracy and start demanding more of it?
rsync or sftp
Of course, if you have incriminating evidence on your phone/server then privacy won't help much if law enforcement shows up with a search warrant. It's easier to obey laws in the first place to void this particular problem.
It's still useful as a checksum algorithm. I use it on my photos to determine if software has messed with the metadata. Clearly we're not talking about a security application here.
You may as well use CRC32, though, which is just as useful for that application and much, much cheaper to compute.
I'd use Adler-32; much simpler than CRC32 (which really is a PITA to implement correctly) and about twice as fast as the most optimized CRC32, while plenty good to thumbmark files. Rsync uses it, for instance. CRC16/32 generally rules supreme for hardware though (shift registers are dirt cheap in hardware, but suck in software, leading to really complex, error-prone optimizations).
There are defences against that sort of attack too. For example, only permitting logins from a physically secured terminal. You can then tell your abductors the password, but they can't use it unless they also compromise the physical security.
It's much easier to have a second alarm password, that appears to give access but provides only fake data. When used it disables the real access and sets off alarms. Write it on an official looking card and keep it in your wallet; this way an abductor won't have to beat you to get it. Or it could provide access but set off alarms in a situation where it's hard to fake access and lives might be at stake. For a bank employee for instance it could notify police and the FBI, then make all operations so slow the criminals will have to sit around for half an hour to get anything done, permitting tracing and staging the local tactical squad.
Going from 10000000 cracking attempts per second to 10 cracking attempts per second is going to stop a lot of attacks, and all it takes is using a properly designed algorithm instead of just sticking the password and a salt into a hash (which is what SaltedHash does).
Store the number of iterations alongside the salt and hash. This way as computers get faster you can rehash your password database once a year by increasing the number of iterations.
If the Internet is going to be a theater of future conflicts, then isn't it sensible for *all* countries to have some aptitude in the area? Has the US sworn off having any "cyberwarriors" of its own? Or is there really going to be one set of rules for the US and another set of rules for the rest of the world?
All countries have them, at least any first and second world, and those in the third world with the resources. Clearly if you're going to attack a country you want to lead with a disruption of their infrastructure and media. It doesn't matter if you hit a refinery with a cruise missile or shut down its computers - the result is the same, and it'll serve the same purpose.
Yes, clearly those scientists that had to repeatedly prove smoking is unhealthy were acting on a liberal agenda. I've learned from Fox News that scientists only care about political agendas, not about promoting a better society or the common welfare of people.
But that is the liberal agenda! FOX News caters to people who don't give a shit about such things.
Well, I guess that touches one of the main misconceptions when it comes to interpretation of scientific work. "Common sense" is not a scientific argument. It lacks rigor. And more often than not, common sense is just plain wrong.
It's also unquantified and unexplored. We may think it's obvious that obese young men get married less (note: get married, not have fewer dates or are less liked by the opposite sex) - but this doesn't say anything about what the difference is. Is it 50%? 5%? 1%? 0.001%? The common sense also doesn't explore the background - is it because obese mean don't *want* to get married? Or because they *mainly* want to get married? Are they obese because they aren't as vain and feel trying to impress women is silly? Is religion a factor? Do women find obese men less attractive because of lowered social status (among other men in particular)? Are there upbringing and social factors? Economic? Etc. If you're a serious sociologist, then clearly these have to be major questions worthy of research.
I take it places like that assume their laws apply globally?
Well, ignoring countries that abduct people from other countries to try them locally (North Korea, Israel, etc), in this case the Thais arrested a Thai citizen.
Dmitry Sklyarov was not a U.S. citizen, yet he had the misfortune of travelling to the U.S., where he was immediately arrested, despite not breaking any crimes while in the U.S.
There are crimes that are covered by treaties - things states extradite individuals for. Then there are political crimes: espionage, political sedition, criticism of leaders, etc. These are explicitly excluded from extradition treaties. This Thai guy is arrested for a political crime. The U.S. doesn't grant visas to politically undesirable individuals - this is the proper way to handle it; don't let them enter to begin with. If you give them a visa, then you have pretty much approved of their person and can't really reasonably turn around and arrest them. For non-political crimes however, if they want to come visit by all means give them a visa, then have police wait to cuff them at the airport. Nothing wrong with that. Dmitry Sklyarov was not arrested for espionage or any other political crime, but as a suspect in a copyright/fraud case. He was given due process and a fair trial, and the court cleared him and he was free to go home or stay in the country as he saw fit (he had a visa after all). This is also the proper way to handle such things.
DS was accused of committing a crime against Adobe, an American company operating in American jurisdiction, hence because the victim is in American jurisdiction it's perfectly reasonable to try him here. But he could have been tried in Russia, too, had he violated a law there in the process.
The Thai king was in Thai jurisdiction when criticized, he is the victim of the crime, and hence it's perfectly reasonable that the accused be tried there. The U.S. would recognize it as a political crime and would never extradite, but the Thai may not view it as a political crime - a lack of distinction normally only found among dictatorships. What if he instead had broken into a Thai bank and looted the Thai king's assets? Would that not have been a crime? You think it's okay to victimize people just because there's a line on a map between you? The problem here isn't arresting people who were abroad when they committed a crime, but the political nature of the crime.
One more reason why functional programming matters. Many programs become trivial to parallelize when you avoid mutation and side-effects outside of limited, carefully-controlled contexts.
More specifically, the problem of parallel programming is the problem of structuring state for concurrent access. Everything else (the mechanics of locks etc) is trivial and mainly a typing exercise.
The reason this is difficult is that it's an optimization; normally when we optimize code we write the naive version first (or near-naive), then optimize it. We might change a hash table to a vector, memcpy() to a few lines of inline assembler for a particular target, hand code CRC/checksumming/RC4 in assembler, use a freelist instead of malloc for some particular data structure, etc. At some point the gains no longer outweigh the effort and we're done. With MT code however, you can't do this, because the very fact that it's going to run concurrently is going to affect the most high-level design. It needs to be made concurrent from the outset; there is no going back later and making just some critical path MT-hot. Since concurrency requires changes at the highest level, existing software is essentially going to need to be completely taken apart and put back together again. More or less a rewrite. And my experience is this frequently fails (programmers who can do this to large, complex bodies of software don't grow on trees). This is why it's hard - it's an optimization that needs to be done before there's anything to optimize. It affects pretty much every aspect of factoring. Not more complex necessarily, sometimes it's just different from what one might do at first glance.
In fact, writing MT-friendly software is a lot like writing portable software. It's really tough to do a good job on existing code (try porting a Windows program to OS X for instance, even though 90% of the code base might have nothing to do with Windows per se, it just uses Windows APIs to get work done). But factor out the platform-specific parts, like the presentation from the outset with an intent to one day port it, and it's perfectly doable. In a first iteration it might only have a UI for a single platform (a "sparse implementation") much like the first round of MT-hot code might run with a concurrency of 1 (because parts are stubbed or just skeletons, or implement the trivial case of a concurrency of one).
Erlang (and other functional, single-static-assignment languages) are perfect for parallel programming.
In that case you can restate the original question as "how do I implement an Erlang compiler and runtime?" If, indeed, Erlang embodies the most efficient way to solve all parallell programming problems. Which of course is absurd. Erlang is useless for implementing servers, kernels, runtimes, networking stacks, file systems, device drivers, VM systems, database servers, or anything else that actually makes a computer tick. It's simply an interface to an already-implemented computing system. It's good to excellent for some problem dmains, but not all domains, and certainly not the computing (system) domain itself. It's one solution to a particular computing domain problem. How well it performs depends on how it's implemented, which brings us back to the original question: how to learn to design and write MT-hot code on SMP hardware.
After watching that video, I am sick and tired of being referred to as a consumer, and not a customer. Unless we are in an economics lecture, or a corporate board room, I think it's truly impolite and frankly condescending to refer to someone that tries to make regular use of your goods and services as a consumer.
Totally agree. In addition, people who build things are producers, not consumers.
I would love to see Radio Shack get back to its DIY roots. This time around maybe they can sell Arduinos and 3D printers. Heck... people are already selling machines that are 3D printers and CNC milling machines put together. It doesn't get much better than that. I want one.
PCBs would be awesome. Upload the design and go pick up the boards a week later. They could get enough volume to bring prototype-run prices way down.
And sell essential tools, which includes things like reflow stations these days. And ribbon cable kits, tools and all.