You know it's funny that you think they want humans extinct, yet they are usually the ones shouting loudest to do something to stop humans going extinct.
It's the non-environmentalists that seem to have the deathwish.
"Wasn't the skinny on geohot that all he did was use other people's work and never really had any real skill or ability?"
Absolutely not, no.
While he was not the only one responsible for the ps3 hacks, he did do one or two things that nobody else has managed to replicate (or nobody has managed to replicate and then disclose anyway). It's one of the reason a variety of scene people are pissed off at him. He built on some of the breakthroughs by other folks but didn't release details of his own insights, just some of the results of them.
He's a clever kid and I'm sure given the right work/environment he'll go far.
He's also a clever kid with a pretty huge ego, but I'm sure we all had that at his age, and his isn't totally unfounded...
"I am of the mind that people should be able to freely choose what they put in their body, without interference from government. In that same thought, I believe that people need to understand that there are penalties for making bad choices. If you choose to abuse drugs, then you better damn well be prepared to choose which drug rehab clinic you are going to attend to kick your habit, by way of your own pocketbook, or choose which funeral home and coffin you want when you are buried."
I know, that's the moral judgement, it feels right, doesn't it?
If they take the risk let them take the consequences! We're all adults here, living in the real world, let them have choice and let them live with it!
It makes perfect sense. Unfortunately the real/human world and perfect sense do not match up very well. People in these situations will absolutely commit crimes to support their habits, and that's worse for everyone.
I'm not from a country in which firearm ownership is permitted, nor is it often desired. Even a mugging is not worth a death, IMHO, though I know it need not come to that, and there is a deterrence factor and all the rest, and that gun control is an argument we REALLY don't need to get into here.... but I would always err on the side of fixing people rather than discarding them. That said I agree that there are some you'll just never help, no matter how hard you try.
As an ex officer you probably have seen the worse end of this, far more than me. I've never encountered a lot of addicts.
"Sorry for the long post/rant."
Not at all. it's actually really interesting to me that (other than this small matter) we've come to somewhat similar viewpoints on the whole thing. My viewpoint comes from having been around a lot of drug taking in my earlier years. A *lot*, but it never seemed to lead to the dark side. Of the people I knew and know that were involved, I can think of none that got into trouble with it. But then that's likely because it was a club scene, most people were at least moderately educated and there was no heroin, ever.
So in that way I don't understand how (as you put it) some idiots can abuse drugs and blame everyone and everything else, but themselves, either.
I 3 my N900 as it's basically a pocket sized computer with added phone function. The N9 is pretty and has better hardware than the N900 (though the processor is still something of a disappointment compared to the rest of the market), but it lacks the physical keyboard I like.
And yes, I know, you can get some tiny bluetooth keyboards these days, but it's still an extra thing to carry.
The N950 is supposed to be the same hardware as the N9, plus keyboard but minus teh pretty. I'll end up with one or the other most likely.
"Put a clause that states that those that become addicted are also responsible to seek and pay for the care from abusing these chemical compounds."
A lot of people seem to consider this some sort of moral issue, that those that chose to use drugs and then got into a mess should damned well pay for their own care and be denied any benefit/welfare money.
But it's precisely these people that we need to focus on the most. People who become addicted and lose themselves to drugs, who run out of money and resort to crime to support their habit - these are precisely the people we as society should be supporting with health programs and rehab, so that they aren't a violent, acquisitve scourge on society.
And that's entirely selfishly motivated. I don't want to be mugged to support someone's habit when we could be helping them function in society.
Meh. I don't use that shit. Other people do and will conitinue to do so. Nothing has yet persuaded them to stop.
Your post is an excellent argument for ending the war on drugs in its current form. We've been fighting this war for decades and yet there are still crack addicts mugging you on the streets.
Most alcohol users can support themselves fine. So can most cigarette smokers. Turns out the vast majority of illegal drug users are the same. And most prescription drug abusers (though that is some bad shit to get into).
"And do not kid yourself marijuana is a gateway drug."
Agreed, you should totally not kid yourself that it's a gateway drug, because it totally isn't.
Yeah, here's the thing bub, the internet is full of good reasons bitcoin is never going to go anywhere, but every time they come up some zealot like yourself just yells "YOUR JELUS!" and then sticks their fingers back in their ears.
I gave a whole list of reasons it's a bad idea, the fact you choose not to see them is your problem, not mine.
I was certainly in that bracket when I was at university, not paying too much attention to all the abstract or 'deep' stuff. But as I've gone on through my career I've found it more and more useful to understand what's going on at deeper and deeper levels.
I truly hope bitcoin does not become a success due to the early adopter problem.
There are people not just sitting on "make you rich" money, or even "fuck you" money. No, there are people sitting on "enough to effectively manipulate the entire economy" money, even if the current instabilities get ironed out.
"Have you visited the Bitcoin forums? Quite a few economists there."
I have visited the bitcoin forums. The stupid, it burns.
Not all the posters, no. But it seems to be a mix of people with a moderate understanding of economics coloured with an extreme libertarian bias, people who have no idea about economics at all, conspiracy theorists and folks who are heavily 'invested' in bitcoin screaming at other people to shut up.
I also think a crypto currency is cool, and an interesting idea. I think the hard quantity limit and fixed creation rate are dumb as hell, and I think what's going on right now is a bubble. I think it's a bubble not just because of the way the price has been moving around, but because there is virtually no genuine economic activity in bitcoins. Almost the entire bitcoin economy is built on exchanges and speculation, there's very little real, actual stuff you can buy with it.
Add to that the hoarding factor, that means people are hanging on to vast swathes of bitcoins as an investment, and what you have is an investment into something with no inherent worth but a lot of inherent scarcity. You don't really have a currency or medium of exchange though.
Oh, and then there are the inactive early blocks, the 25% or so of the current total of bitcoins that are thought to be in the hands of one or two people, who stand to have control over a quarter of the entire BTC wealth if it takes off... not a recipe for stability, nor a recipe for people like me to feed 'real' cash into the system to enrich them.
So why do people like me get mildly angry about it? I think it's because firstly it looks like a missed opportunity. Bootstrapping a crypto currency is a fantastic thing to do. Bootstrapping one with the properties of bitcoin is just a disappointment.
Deflationary currency makes the credit/loans a much more difficult proposition. It encourages people to hold on to money as an investment instead of using it as a medium of exchange and keeping the economy liquid. This is (IMHO) a bad thing.
A strictly controlled supply that does not keep pace with the growth of the economy (or in fact change at all later on) is a sure-fire recipe for deflation, the aforementioned bad thing.
Factor in that it is thought likely that "Satoshi", whoever (s)he is very likely has a full quarter of the current supply of currency under his/her control, from the early days of the production curve... yeah, not buying in to that.
I understand that freedom-loving libertarians (or crazies as I like to think of most of them) don't like this logic and have decided that an expansible money supply is somehow theft from them. Fine, whatever. Join in with bitcoin, I won't stop you or try to subvert the system, but neither will I join in.
Limited supply, deflation, absurdly huge difference in 'mining' speeds between first adopters and the comparatively early adopters on the thing now, various other weirdnesses... these all counted against it.
As a P2P crypto currency system it's pretty cool. It just had a few things wrong.
Oh, and the morans on the bitcoin forum. Dear god is that place 'live with 'em.
75% of admins probably also don't do anything much with SELinux, but some people have a use for it.
I see this as the sudo equivalent - you can let users escalate prvileges with this, but only certain privileges. It's an extra tool for those who do need to lock things down at a very granular level, and as such will find a niche.
The likes of you and me at home or on the average (non public-facing) server will probably not care so much.
It's another example of the broken PKI that we have on the web. There aren't many real bugs in the SSL/TLS protocol family any more (clearly the one in TFA should be patched in more places) but the infrastructure of "trusted" authorities used by the web is b0rked, IMHO.
I had a couple of NSLU2's. One tran a simple web server, IMAP and POP3 mail servers (with all sorts of spam filtering) and ssh server. The other ran mediatomb and torrenflux.
The mail server had a 4GB USB stick as it's main drive for several years, the other had a hard drive in a USB caddy which made a hell of a speed difference.
They weren't exactly quick but they were cheap and low powered. If you cut out everything you didn't need (and I mean everything) from the standard debian distro, you could get an acceptable system running. Then I bought a sheevaplug and the difference was incredible. Modern processor, modern speeds, comparatively lots of RAM...
I've also been making kernel alterations for the WD Sharespace, and have dug into the arch/arm source tree. It's not *that* messy, it just has loads of different pieces of initialisation code depending on processor variants, board types, attached devices etc etc
Hmm, while that certainly isn't vulnerable to the man with the pipe, I'm pretty sure it's not a proper validation of your vote either, because you have no idea if the system has counted your offset correctly...
"I mean, its not like people are not using them for trade."
That's exactly what it's like. There are multiple millions out there and some guy can take over a single account, then trash the market value single handedly!
I'm no cryptologist or cryptographer either, though I have taken a professional interest in SSL/TLS protocols and infrastructure over the last few years.
I have a friend who is a cryptographer (doctor of mathematics with emphasis on crypto algorithms, their complexity etc etc). The man is a hopeless drunk and can't speak in coherent sentences. I think says a lot! The brainpower is obviously used in strange directions.
Yeah, if the authority is not acting in good faith you're pretty screwed anyway, it's true. you little scheme there is interesting. If being able to verify your vote relies entirely on you remembering which token/key was the real one, and as far as the verification interface (whatever that may be) is concerned, all the tokens you submitted were valid, then that's possibly workable. Assuming the man with the length of sucker-rod hasn't got you to divulge the features of the real one ahead of time... You're right, there probably are clever schemes that could get around this using something you know in your head to verify an array of verified responses from the voting system. It does become a complex proposition to the average voter though - in the UK recently a lot of people were persuaded to vote against bringing in AV on the grounds that putting numbers next to name sin order of preference was far too complex!
It's a difficult problem. I wouldn't trust Diebold either. You have a closed source system that's been shown to be open to compromise and (at least sometimes) inaccurate, and a CEO that explicitly promises to deliver the election to his favourite party. I'm not sure where my money would be right now; I certainly trust paper more than closed source machines.
I guess I just have a reaction to people that say "I want to verify my vote was counted as I cast it!", because there are good reasons we have secret ballots at present.
But $1000 worth at what price? The price of bitcoin dropped to about 1% of it's previous level due to these activities. Th eguy could have gotten away with 100 times more bitcoins than a simple heist would have allowed.
I wonder if that's what this whole scam was about. Temporarily crash the currency to get around withdrawal limits...
Seriously. If there is a way to prove to yourself that your vote has been recorded correctly, that is not vulnerable to a man standing behind you with a length of pipe, I'd love to know it.
It still misses the point.... Sure that there scheme stops voting machine manufacturers from knowing what you voted, but the principal remains the same - Any way to verify to yourself that your vote has been counted properly and for the correct candidate, is bad.
If you can show who you voted for, someone else can coerce you to show who you voted for and make sure you voted the "right" way to earn that 20 bucks, or to earn your way out of a beating.
Slashdot Mirror
You know it's funny that you think they want humans extinct, yet they are usually the ones shouting loudest to do something to stop humans going extinct.
It's the non-environmentalists that seem to have the deathwish.
"Wasn't the skinny on geohot that all he did was use other people's work and never really had any real skill or ability?"
Absolutely not, no.
While he was not the only one responsible for the ps3 hacks, he did do one or two things that nobody else has managed to replicate (or nobody has managed to replicate and then disclose anyway). It's one of the reason a variety of scene people are pissed off at him. He built on some of the breakthroughs by other folks but didn't release details of his own insights, just some of the results of them.
He's a clever kid and I'm sure given the right work/environment he'll go far.
He's also a clever kid with a pretty huge ego, but I'm sure we all had that at his age, and his isn't totally unfounded...
Sorry, your broadcast wasn't on a major network so it doesn't count. Silly citizen thinking this law would apply to you!
No, you are the target, your actions make you a target for a lawsuit when one of the real people picks up the copyright.
Yeah, I can't think of a way this law makes any sense either, but then that's been true of a lot of laws in the last decade or so.
"I am of the mind that people should be able to freely choose what they put in their body, without interference from government. In that same thought, I believe that people need to understand that there are penalties for making bad choices. If you choose to abuse drugs, then you better damn well be prepared to choose which drug rehab clinic you are going to attend to kick your habit, by way of your own pocketbook, or choose which funeral home and coffin you want when you are buried."
I know, that's the moral judgement, it feels right, doesn't it?
If they take the risk let them take the consequences! We're all adults here, living in the real world, let them have choice and let them live with it!
It makes perfect sense. Unfortunately the real/human world and perfect sense do not match up very well. People in these situations will absolutely commit crimes to support their habits, and that's worse for everyone.
I'm not from a country in which firearm ownership is permitted, nor is it often desired. Even a mugging is not worth a death, IMHO, though I know it need not come to that, and there is a deterrence factor and all the rest, and that gun control is an argument we REALLY don't need to get into here.... but I would always err on the side of fixing people rather than discarding them. That said I agree that there are some you'll just never help, no matter how hard you try.
As an ex officer you probably have seen the worse end of this, far more than me. I've never encountered a lot of addicts.
"Sorry for the long post/rant."
Not at all. it's actually really interesting to me that (other than this small matter) we've come to somewhat similar viewpoints on the whole thing. My viewpoint comes from having been around a lot of drug taking in my earlier years. A *lot*, but it never seemed to lead to the dark side. Of the people I knew and know that were involved, I can think of none that got into trouble with it. But then that's likely because it was a club scene, most people were at least moderately educated and there was no heroin, ever.
So in that way I don't understand how (as you put it) some idiots can abuse drugs and blame everyone and everything else, but themselves, either.
I'll buy it, unless the N950 materialises.
I 3 my N900 as it's basically a pocket sized computer with added phone function. The N9 is pretty and has better hardware than the N900 (though the processor is still something of a disappointment compared to the rest of the market), but it lacks the physical keyboard I like.
And yes, I know, you can get some tiny bluetooth keyboards these days, but it's still an extra thing to carry.
The N950 is supposed to be the same hardware as the N9, plus keyboard but minus teh pretty. I'll end up with one or the other most likely.
"Put a clause that states that those that become addicted are also responsible to seek and pay for the care from abusing these chemical compounds."
A lot of people seem to consider this some sort of moral issue, that those that chose to use drugs and then got into a mess should damned well pay for their own care and be denied any benefit/welfare money.
But it's precisely these people that we need to focus on the most. People who become addicted and lose themselves to drugs, who run out of money and resort to crime to support their habit - these are precisely the people we as society should be supporting with health programs and rehab, so that they aren't a violent, acquisitve scourge on society.
And that's entirely selfishly motivated. I don't want to be mugged to support someone's habit when we could be helping them function in society.
Meh. I don't use that shit. Other people do and will conitinue to do so. Nothing has yet persuaded them to stop.
Your post is an excellent argument for ending the war on drugs in its current form. We've been fighting this war for decades and yet there are still crack addicts mugging you on the streets.
Time for a new approach.
Lies, fabrication, bullshit.
Most alcohol users can support themselves fine. So can most cigarette smokers. Turns out the vast majority of illegal drug users are the same. And most prescription drug abusers (though that is some bad shit to get into).
"And do not kid yourself marijuana is a gateway drug."
Agreed, you should totally not kid yourself that it's a gateway drug, because it totally isn't.
Yeah, here's the thing bub, the internet is full of good reasons bitcoin is never going to go anywhere, but every time they come up some zealot like yourself just yells "YOUR JELUS!" and then sticks their fingers back in their ears.
I gave a whole list of reasons it's a bad idea, the fact you choose not to see them is your problem, not mine.
But there are times when it all comes in useful.
I was certainly in that bracket when I was at university, not paying too much attention to all the abstract or 'deep' stuff. But as I've gone on through my career I've found it more and more useful to understand what's going on at deeper and deeper levels.
I truly hope bitcoin does not become a success due to the early adopter problem.
There are people not just sitting on "make you rich" money, or even "fuck you" money. No, there are people sitting on "enough to effectively manipulate the entire economy" money, even if the current instabilities get ironed out.
"Have you visited the Bitcoin forums? Quite a few economists there."
I have visited the bitcoin forums. The stupid, it burns.
Not all the posters, no. But it seems to be a mix of people with a moderate understanding of economics coloured with an extreme libertarian bias, people who have no idea about economics at all, conspiracy theorists and folks who are heavily 'invested' in bitcoin screaming at other people to shut up.
I also think a crypto currency is cool, and an interesting idea. I think the hard quantity limit and fixed creation rate are dumb as hell, and I think what's going on right now is a bubble. I think it's a bubble not just because of the way the price has been moving around, but because there is virtually no genuine economic activity in bitcoins. Almost the entire bitcoin economy is built on exchanges and speculation, there's very little real, actual stuff you can buy with it.
Add to that the hoarding factor, that means people are hanging on to vast swathes of bitcoins as an investment, and what you have is an investment into something with no inherent worth but a lot of inherent scarcity. You don't really have a currency or medium of exchange though.
Oh, and then there are the inactive early blocks, the 25% or so of the current total of bitcoins that are thought to be in the hands of one or two people, who stand to have control over a quarter of the entire BTC wealth if it takes off... not a recipe for stability, nor a recipe for people like me to feed 'real' cash into the system to enrich them.
So why do people like me get mildly angry about it? I think it's because firstly it looks like a missed opportunity. Bootstrapping a crypto currency is a fantastic thing to do. Bootstrapping one with the properties of bitcoin is just a disappointment.
Also the fanclub drives me mad.
Actually there are bitcoin laundries already in existence. The idea is that they take your money, and give you some random other money.
Of course with an audit trail like that you're most likely to get some other dirty money....
That's down to individual opinion it seems.
Deflationary currency makes the credit/loans a much more difficult proposition. It encourages people to hold on to money as an investment instead of using it as a medium of exchange and keeping the economy liquid. This is (IMHO) a bad thing.
A strictly controlled supply that does not keep pace with the growth of the economy (or in fact change at all later on) is a sure-fire recipe for deflation, the aforementioned bad thing.
Factor in that it is thought likely that "Satoshi", whoever (s)he is very likely has a full quarter of the current supply of currency under his/her control, from the early days of the production curve... yeah, not buying in to that.
I understand that freedom-loving libertarians (or crazies as I like to think of most of them) don't like this logic and have decided that an expansible money supply is somehow theft from them. Fine, whatever. Join in with bitcoin, I won't stop you or try to subvert the system, but neither will I join in.
Agreed.
Limited supply, deflation, absurdly huge difference in 'mining' speeds between first adopters and the comparatively early adopters on the thing now, various other weirdnesses... these all counted against it.
As a P2P crypto currency system it's pretty cool. It just had a few things wrong.
Oh, and the morans on the bitcoin forum. Dear god is that place 'live with 'em.
75% of admins probably also don't do anything much with SELinux, but some people have a use for it.
I see this as the sudo equivalent - you can let users escalate prvileges with this, but only certain privileges. It's an extra tool for those who do need to lock things down at a very granular level, and as such will find a niche.
The likes of you and me at home or on the average (non public-facing) server will probably not care so much.
They've been hacked. Not through this (probably).
It's another example of the broken PKI that we have on the web. There aren't many real bugs in the SSL/TLS protocol family any more (clearly the one in TFA should be patched in more places) but the infrastructure of "trusted" authorities used by the web is b0rked, IMHO.
Too many authorities, too many unknowns.
I had a couple of NSLU2's. One tran a simple web server, IMAP and POP3 mail servers (with all sorts of spam filtering) and ssh server. The other ran mediatomb and torrenflux.
The mail server had a 4GB USB stick as it's main drive for several years, the other had a hard drive in a USB caddy which made a hell of a speed difference.
They weren't exactly quick but they were cheap and low powered. If you cut out everything you didn't need (and I mean everything) from the standard debian distro, you could get an acceptable system running. Then I bought a sheevaplug and the difference was incredible. Modern processor, modern speeds, comparatively lots of RAM...
I've also been making kernel alterations for the WD Sharespace, and have dug into the arch/arm source tree. It's not *that* messy, it just has loads of different pieces of initialisation code depending on processor variants, board types, attached devices etc etc
Hmm, while that certainly isn't vulnerable to the man with the pipe, I'm pretty sure it's not a proper validation of your vote either, because you have no idea if the system has counted your offset correctly...
"I mean, its not like people are not using them for trade."
That's exactly what it's like. There are multiple millions out there and some guy can take over a single account, then trash the market value single handedly!
I'm no cryptologist or cryptographer either, though I have taken a professional interest in SSL/TLS protocols and infrastructure over the last few years.
I have a friend who is a cryptographer (doctor of mathematics with emphasis on crypto algorithms, their complexity etc etc). The man is a hopeless drunk and can't speak in coherent sentences. I think says a lot! The brainpower is obviously used in strange directions.
Yeah, if the authority is not acting in good faith you're pretty screwed anyway, it's true. you little scheme there is interesting. If being able to verify your vote relies entirely on you remembering which token/key was the real one, and as far as the verification interface (whatever that may be) is concerned, all the tokens you submitted were valid, then that's possibly workable. Assuming the man with the length of sucker-rod hasn't got you to divulge the features of the real one ahead of time... You're right, there probably are clever schemes that could get around this using something you know in your head to verify an array of verified responses from the voting system. It does become a complex proposition to the average voter though - in the UK recently a lot of people were persuaded to vote against bringing in AV on the grounds that putting numbers next to name sin order of preference was far too complex!
It's a difficult problem. I wouldn't trust Diebold either. You have a closed source system that's been shown to be open to compromise and (at least sometimes) inaccurate, and a CEO that explicitly promises to deliver the election to his favourite party. I'm not sure where my money would be right now; I certainly trust paper more than closed source machines.
I guess I just have a reaction to people that say "I want to verify my vote was counted as I cast it!", because there are good reasons we have secret ballots at present.
"The value of bitcoin is NOT ARBITRARILY DECLARED by some high priest of the interwebs."
Really?
Have you read the front page of mtgox?
The guy running it says the value WILL BE back to $17.50 when the exchange comes back up.
But $1000 worth at what price? The price of bitcoin dropped to about 1% of it's previous level due to these activities. Th eguy could have gotten away with 100 times more bitcoins than a simple heist would have allowed.
I wonder if that's what this whole scam was about. Temporarily crash the currency to get around withdrawal limits...
Please enlighten me.
Seriously. If there is a way to prove to yourself that your vote has been recorded correctly, that is not vulnerable to a man standing behind you with a length of pipe, I'd love to know it.
It still misses the point.... Sure that there scheme stops voting machine manufacturers from knowing what you voted, but the principal remains the same - Any way to verify to yourself that your vote has been counted properly and for the correct candidate, is bad.
If you can show who you voted for, someone else can coerce you to show who you voted for and make sure you voted the "right" way to earn that 20 bucks, or to earn your way out of a beating.