The press release says that the government said existing laws don't take into account allowing an exchange to trade a virtual currency (yet).
The article sensationalizes this by saying "banned", implying that it was legal before.
Lastly, the author of the article seems to think without an exchange, Bitcoin can't be traded, which of course is false. So, by "banning" the existence of a commercial exchange, the author concludes that Bitcoin entirely has been banned in the country.
I could be missing something, but I don't think Bitcoin has been banned in Thailand as barter.
Exactly. This is more about the content and how to cheaply produce and distribute it securely than something for next gen computers. This will be more for broadcasters, movie theaters, and perhaps game/media consoles. It wouldn't surprise me if the big leap in the technology is being able to press each disc with it's own unique encryption key that has to be 'activated' over the Internet before it can be decrypted and played.
Is there *any* hope that Sony will push patches upstream? I would imagine not, but it would certainly be a nice gesture and could result in more PS4 sales if they did.
It looks and sounds like the 1/5 scale prototype is electric and very crudely controlled... only 8 throttle settings? The blades are counter rotating, so no tail rotor is needed except to rotate the craft (which it can't, it seems). Any cyclic adjustments to one of the lift rotors looks like it could cause a catastrophic collision with the other. It seems to me the demo in the video was basically completely uncontrollable except for the throttle.
I don't think this could really be a real scale prototype let alone a real possible model of a full scale craft that could work.
I think the DRM would have been accepted a lot better. I think the Surface, Win8 and then the XBone had their flaws, but there is a definite piling-on mentality against MS. They just aren't sexy and their marketing and customer education/relations is awful and often just downright confusing at times. Again, I'm not defending MS or their products, they just seem to provide the perfect storm for consumer outrage and bad product launches where others might have faired a lot better given the same circumstances, imho.
It is basically a digital barter currency that people can trade. It has a cryptologic foundation so you can't just claim to own any without actually either being given some or 'mining' it. There's only a finite amount of bitcoins and mining it involves solving a mathematical problem that gets more difficult as each batch/block is solved and issued. Right now the hardware to effectively mine it is very specific and you basically will burn electricity at a cost roughly equivalent to the going rate of bitcoin. The early miners using just a standard PC to mine are theoretically sitting on bitcoins valued in the millions... if they haven't lost them after a crashed drive or such over the years.
You aren't liable for *somebody else's* illegal activity on your modem.
You certainly are for your own and remember you have to authenticate if you want to use more than two sessions per month. Being that it is a public network, I imagine all net neutrality goes out the window. They might only allow two services: web and email, and all packet poking/peeking is fair game.
If they find lots of illegal activity coming through your modem the police wouldn't flinch to issue a search warrant at your front door. But, don't worry if it wasn't you. It will be you spouse, child, roommate, etc. who will go to jail after the police haul all the computer equipment in your home away as evidence.
The article addresses some of those things. They are separate networks and I'm guessing the public one is NATed further upstream. They claim that it will be safe, secure and there's no legal liability if somebody does something bad on the public network through your modem. I think it is a rather clever way to instantly have coverage where high densities of people already are. But, I'd certainly want an opt-out option available as a consumer. Comcast, btw, already firewalls a laundry list of ports (as I discovered a few weekends ago after an 'update' which broke my email amongst other things... for "my protection".) I'm guessing they probably do even more on the public network.
You can opt out and it only applies to Comcast rented equipment. There are two benefits, the obvious being more widespread WiFi availability and those who openly want to share their network with neighbors (as a family member of mine does) can have increased security by locking their own network while still having the public one available. It would be nice if Comcast gave participants a $5 monthly discount or something for participating, but I don't see that happening.
Red flags go off in my head when you say 'prove X is incompetent'. You've already loaded the deck against a person and that's not fair. Even if you can narrow down the source of problems being related to what goes across the desk of this particular company's position, there can be many other reasons besides 'the manager is incompetent'. It could be company culture which undermines that position. It could be that the subordinates are the ones who actually need training, and sure, maybe the manager needs more training. Pointing a finger at somebody and listing a laundry list of 'proof' that they are incompetent isn't going to solve anything. I get the impression that you might have been hired because of your technical ability but are now in the position of trying to solve a personnel problem which might be a bit out of your depth. The company may even already did their which hunt and just want to use you to justify firing the guy(?). I'd say walk away. Don't be that external consultant who was hired to recommend sacking a guy, it never ends well. At best, it's just bad karma, at worst you would have made an enemy for life who could make his goal in life to make you miserable. It's not worth it. It's the company's own responsibility to determine who is a bad employee and clean their own house.
Dealerships often install a box to override some car's functions, like preventing it from starting, in case the lessee stops making their payments. They also give the dealership GPS locations for the car. (This was featured on Car Lot Rescue recently.) It wouldn't surprise me if there was also a door-lock override so they could more easily do a repo.
For that matter, what about OnStar? So keeping score, I'm counting 6 ways to get into a car: it was unlocked (duh), physical key entry, regular remote fob, remote dealership, remote OnStar, and accident detection. I guess you could throw into the mix forced entry (breaking window, slim jim, sun roof, etc.)
It works well for small teams who already use good practices and know exactly what needs to be done. The programmers keep things in their heads rather than having to write documents or have meetings ad nauseum. It is honestly not common when it works flawlessly, but it can work and cut a lot of corners to get a product out the door.
I found some of the opinions at 37signals a bit self serving and conveniently leaving out a lot of gotchas, though. Yes, going straight from concept to code is great when you aren't just the programmer but the client as well. And as you spread responsibilities out to more team members, guess what? All those processes that were tossed come back into play as being necessary.
To me, though, a big red flag was the mention of code routinely getting stomped on even though they are using SVN. On my projects we come to a screeching halt when a conflict arises and we resolve it carefully. If programmers are routinely choose 'use mine' on commits then there are some bad practices going on. That's also true if things are getting pushed 'live' too quickly. It sounds like Esther is letting the programmers run the asylum.
Amen. I was once put as a lead programmer for an MVC project that was years behind schedule. What we found was appalling. And, I'm not kidding: They merged all the controllers in one giant class file, moved much of the views into the database (for no apparent reason) and used codewords throughout instead of meaningful class/variable names. They had painted themselves into such a corner that they were refusing basic feature requests because 'it wasn't possible' any more. They were big proponents for MVC but obviously didn't have a clue what it actually was, or at least were trying to be so clever that it bit them in the ass.
No. The first big MVC project I worked on had a project manager with that assumption. What happened is the Models were sparse because those writing them didn't anticipate everything needed by the Controllers and Views. So, a lot of what should have been in the Models was in the Controllers. Worse, the Views ended up having a lot of code that should have been in the Controllers and Models. Since those early days I/we've been very conscious about pushing as much upstream (V -> C -> M) as is reasonable. It seems to work better to divide the workload by app component so code (ideally) gets put in the right place as it is written.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'grok' but it's important to know what's possible. I remember a student asking a prof: Are we really going to remember how to do this 5+ years from now when we might actually need it?? And the prof said that the point was to know that it is even possible and demonstrate, at least for a short while, that you can do it. Then later when you may need it, you will know it exists, hopefully what it was called, and have the confidence knowing you can implement it.
So, a bad programmer might say 'it's not possible' when given a problem, a better programmer will say it's possible but we need to find/buy a library to do it, and a good programmer will be able to implement the solution themselves. (btw- I'm not saying leveraging libraries and plugins is a bad thing, it's just not *always* the best solution.)
I've worked on a number of projects which started out seeming to be simple but ended up using some semi-advanced math. It is rather rewarding to bust out a solution to a problem that others might have failed on.
I pay you two chickens for a goat, what's the difference? I think the legitimacy question here isn't so much for the medium but for the cash exchanges from government currencies to barter currency without the law required accountability.
That doesn't make sense to me. Of course JS code, HTML, text, images, movies, etc. will be copyrighted. It's just a communication medium. Just because it is relatively new and the InTeRnEt doesn't mean it should all be an open collaboration with everything given away by default. Demanding 'free' Javascript is a bad message, imho. It gives the sense that it should all be free and therefore it might even be ethical to steal.
Don't get me wrong, I was a Linux kernel contributor for several years and I've released my own projects under L/GPL. But, I'm also a commercial programmer who knows the importance of keeping proprietary code protected. I don't find the two in conflict. I'm even on the fence for thinking a semi-standarized web DRM might not be a bad thing.
Part of my distaste on the matter stems from students who email me about a few papers I posted on the web while in college. Several blatantly told me they are going to submit my paper with their name at the top but just wanted a few clarifications in case their prof asked them any questions. Pissed the hell out of me. It was completely lost on some that that was stealing, plagiarism, and cheating. The web isn't all public domain and it wasn't meant to be and it shouldn't be or else it would become a very dull desert wasteland.
Slashdot Mirror
Three things:
The press release says that the government said existing laws don't take into account allowing an exchange to trade a virtual currency (yet).
The article sensationalizes this by saying "banned", implying that it was legal before.
Lastly, the author of the article seems to think without an exchange, Bitcoin can't be traded, which of course is false. So, by "banning" the existence of a commercial exchange, the author concludes that Bitcoin entirely has been banned in the country.
I could be missing something, but I don't think Bitcoin has been banned in Thailand as barter.
Exactly. This is more about the content and how to cheaply produce and distribute it securely than something for next gen computers. This will be more for broadcasters, movie theaters, and perhaps game/media consoles. It wouldn't surprise me if the big leap in the technology is being able to press each disc with it's own unique encryption key that has to be 'activated' over the Internet before it can be decrypted and played.
Why is CHiPS(*) actually posing with the sign like it is theirs? That just seems like an odd thing to do.
* Cue exploding cars in the background
How could that possibly work? He's actively looking for pr0n, so he'd simply turn off any controls that inhibit that.
Anybody care to post a good form letter?
Exactly. It's about taxing the flow of currency, virtual or not. And that tax might be government or private.
Am I a chicken farmer or minting government coins?
Is there *any* hope that Sony will push patches upstream? I would imagine not, but it would certainly be a nice gesture and could result in more PS4 sales if they did.
It looks and sounds like the 1/5 scale prototype is electric and very crudely controlled... only 8 throttle settings? The blades are counter rotating, so no tail rotor is needed except to rotate the craft (which it can't, it seems). Any cyclic adjustments to one of the lift rotors looks like it could cause a catastrophic collision with the other. It seems to me the demo in the video was basically completely uncontrollable except for the throttle.
I don't think this could really be a real scale prototype let alone a real possible model of a full scale craft that could work.
I think the DRM would have been accepted a lot better. I think the Surface, Win8 and then the XBone had their flaws, but there is a definite piling-on mentality against MS. They just aren't sexy and their marketing and customer education/relations is awful and often just downright confusing at times. Again, I'm not defending MS or their products, they just seem to provide the perfect storm for consumer outrage and bad product launches where others might have faired a lot better given the same circumstances, imho.
It is basically a digital barter currency that people can trade. It has a cryptologic foundation so you can't just claim to own any without actually either being given some or 'mining' it. There's only a finite amount of bitcoins and mining it involves solving a mathematical problem that gets more difficult as each batch/block is solved and issued. Right now the hardware to effectively mine it is very specific and you basically will burn electricity at a cost roughly equivalent to the going rate of bitcoin. The early miners using just a standard PC to mine are theoretically sitting on bitcoins valued in the millions... if they haven't lost them after a crashed drive or such over the years.
(Edit: Flooz, not Flooze :')
to cash in my Flooze stockpile when I retire! It's the future. Whoopi Goldberg told me herself!
Me, too, but the problem is nobody would opt-in out of ignorance and a public project with real potential positive results would die out of default.
You aren't liable for *somebody else's* illegal activity on your modem.
You certainly are for your own and remember you have to authenticate if you want to use more than two sessions per month. Being that it is a public network, I imagine all net neutrality goes out the window. They might only allow two services: web and email, and all packet poking/peeking is fair game.
If they find lots of illegal activity coming through your modem the police wouldn't flinch to issue a search warrant at your front door. But, don't worry if it wasn't you. It will be you spouse, child, roommate, etc. who will go to jail after the police haul all the computer equipment in your home away as evidence.
The article addresses some of those things. They are separate networks and I'm guessing the public one is NATed further upstream. They claim that it will be safe, secure and there's no legal liability if somebody does something bad on the public network through your modem. I think it is a rather clever way to instantly have coverage where high densities of people already are. But, I'd certainly want an opt-out option available as a consumer. Comcast, btw, already firewalls a laundry list of ports (as I discovered a few weekends ago after an 'update' which broke my email amongst other things... for "my protection".) I'm guessing they probably do even more on the public network.
You can opt out and it only applies to Comcast rented equipment. There are two benefits, the obvious being more widespread WiFi availability and those who openly want to share their network with neighbors (as a family member of mine does) can have increased security by locking their own network while still having the public one available. It would be nice if Comcast gave participants a $5 monthly discount or something for participating, but I don't see that happening.
Red flags go off in my head when you say 'prove X is incompetent'. You've already loaded the deck against a person and that's not fair. Even if you can narrow down the source of problems being related to what goes across the desk of this particular company's position, there can be many other reasons besides 'the manager is incompetent'. It could be company culture which undermines that position. It could be that the subordinates are the ones who actually need training, and sure, maybe the manager needs more training. Pointing a finger at somebody and listing a laundry list of 'proof' that they are incompetent isn't going to solve anything. I get the impression that you might have been hired because of your technical ability but are now in the position of trying to solve a personnel problem which might be a bit out of your depth. The company may even already did their which hunt and just want to use you to justify firing the guy(?). I'd say walk away. Don't be that external consultant who was hired to recommend sacking a guy, it never ends well. At best, it's just bad karma, at worst you would have made an enemy for life who could make his goal in life to make you miserable. It's not worth it. It's the company's own responsibility to determine who is a bad employee and clean their own house.
Dealerships often install a box to override some car's functions, like preventing it from starting, in case the lessee stops making their payments. They also give the dealership GPS locations for the car. (This was featured on Car Lot Rescue recently.) It wouldn't surprise me if there was also a door-lock override so they could more easily do a repo.
For that matter, what about OnStar? So keeping score, I'm counting 6 ways to get into a car: it was unlocked (duh), physical key entry, regular remote fob, remote dealership, remote OnStar, and accident detection. I guess you could throw into the mix forced entry (breaking window, slim jim, sun roof, etc.)
It works well for small teams who already use good practices and know exactly what needs to be done. The programmers keep things in their heads rather than having to write documents or have meetings ad nauseum. It is honestly not common when it works flawlessly, but it can work and cut a lot of corners to get a product out the door.
I found some of the opinions at 37signals a bit self serving and conveniently leaving out a lot of gotchas, though. Yes, going straight from concept to code is great when you aren't just the programmer but the client as well. And as you spread responsibilities out to more team members, guess what? All those processes that were tossed come back into play as being necessary.
To me, though, a big red flag was the mention of code routinely getting stomped on even though they are using SVN. On my projects we come to a screeching halt when a conflict arises and we resolve it carefully. If programmers are routinely choose 'use mine' on commits then there are some bad practices going on. That's also true if things are getting pushed 'live' too quickly. It sounds like Esther is letting the programmers run the asylum.
Amen. I was once put as a lead programmer for an MVC project that was years behind schedule. What we found was appalling. And, I'm not kidding: They merged all the controllers in one giant class file, moved much of the views into the database (for no apparent reason) and used codewords throughout instead of meaningful class/variable names. They had painted themselves into such a corner that they were refusing basic feature requests because 'it wasn't possible' any more. They were big proponents for MVC but obviously didn't have a clue what it actually was, or at least were trying to be so clever that it bit them in the ass.
No. The first big MVC project I worked on had a project manager with that assumption. What happened is the Models were sparse because those writing them didn't anticipate everything needed by the Controllers and Views. So, a lot of what should have been in the Models was in the Controllers. Worse, the Views ended up having a lot of code that should have been in the Controllers and Models. Since those early days I/we've been very conscious about pushing as much upstream (V -> C -> M) as is reasonable. It seems to work better to divide the workload by app component so code (ideally) gets put in the right place as it is written.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'grok' but it's important to know what's possible. I remember a student asking a prof: Are we really going to remember how to do this 5+ years from now when we might actually need it?? And the prof said that the point was to know that it is even possible and demonstrate, at least for a short while, that you can do it. Then later when you may need it, you will know it exists, hopefully what it was called, and have the confidence knowing you can implement it.
So, a bad programmer might say 'it's not possible' when given a problem, a better programmer will say it's possible but we need to find/buy a library to do it, and a good programmer will be able to implement the solution themselves. (btw- I'm not saying leveraging libraries and plugins is a bad thing, it's just not *always* the best solution.)
I've worked on a number of projects which started out seeming to be simple but ended up using some semi-advanced math. It is rather rewarding to bust out a solution to a problem that others might have failed on.
I pay you two chickens for a goat, what's the difference? I think the legitimacy question here isn't so much for the medium but for the cash exchanges from government currencies to barter currency without the law required accountability.
That doesn't make sense to me. Of course JS code, HTML, text, images, movies, etc. will be copyrighted. It's just a communication medium. Just because it is relatively new and the InTeRnEt doesn't mean it should all be an open collaboration with everything given away by default. Demanding 'free' Javascript is a bad message, imho. It gives the sense that it should all be free and therefore it might even be ethical to steal.
Don't get me wrong, I was a Linux kernel contributor for several years and I've released my own projects under L/GPL. But, I'm also a commercial programmer who knows the importance of keeping proprietary code protected. I don't find the two in conflict. I'm even on the fence for thinking a semi-standarized web DRM might not be a bad thing.
Part of my distaste on the matter stems from students who email me about a few papers I posted on the web while in college. Several blatantly told me they are going to submit my paper with their name at the top but just wanted a few clarifications in case their prof asked them any questions. Pissed the hell out of me. It was completely lost on some that that was stealing, plagiarism, and cheating. The web isn't all public domain and it wasn't meant to be and it shouldn't be or else it would become a very dull desert wasteland.