There was one major integer overflow in bitcoin that allowed a transaction to generate billions of new bitcoins. The network was resilient enough to abandon the original block number 74638. Assuming pool operators were notified soon enough a similar rollback would work in the future as well. It would have to be within a few blocks of the bad transaction or there would be a huge loss to people who performed legitimate transactions in the interim (or the client could just be patched to completely ignore the specific bad transactions and keep the original blockchain, but that would probably be less preferable in the long run).
If you disagree please tell me what body count YOU define as 'the line',
I would go farther back and see whether you blame the "progressive" north U.S.A. that wanted to control the south and happened to abolish slavery as an afterthought, or perhaps the "progressive" American Colonies that rebelled against the British empire. Probably it would have been better if everyone had sat around in the trees instead of coming down to farm. After all, ghengis khan wouldn't have gotten very far without horses, would he? The first single-celled organism's genotype was good enough for me. All this progressive multicellularism and biodiversity has just resulted in death and heartache.
How do I prove that I'm a U.S. citizen with only an out-of-state drivers' license? Bring a copy of my birth certificate? Or maybe being white non-hispanic will be a sufficient proof of my citizenship?
Just to feed the troll: The REnouveau team already has nVidia's code (minus comments). That is not sufficient to write a high quality driver because the code contains a subset of the hardware interface specification.
About six months ago, I was overexerting myself trying to get rid of a terrible virus on a client's PC (I own a PC repair shop and have been fixing computers for over 10 years). Given my level of expertise, I thought I'd be able to get rid of it fairly quickly and without hassle, but as was made evident by my colossal failure, I was horribly, horribly wrong.
I couldn't remove the virus no matter what method I used. I tried all the latest anti-virus software and all the usual tricks, but it was all in vain. Failure after failure, my life was slowly being sucked away as I spent more and more of my time trying to get rid of this otherworldly virus.
Frustrated and stressed by my own failure, I began distancing myself from my wife and children. After a few days, I began verbally abusing them, and it eventually escalated into physical abuse. I was slowly losing what remaining sanity I had left. If this had continued for much longer, it is highly probable that I would have committed suicide. A mere shell of what I once was, I barricaded myself in my bedroom and cried myself to sleep for days on end.
That's when it happened: I found Linux! I installed Linux right on the client's PC, ran a scan, and it immediately got rid of all the viruses without a single problem. Linux accomplished in record time what I was unable to accomplish after a full week. Wow! Such a thing!
Linux is outstanding! My client's computer is running faster than ever! I highly recommend you install Linux right this minuteness, run a scan, and then boost your PC speed in record time! Linux came through with flying colours where no one else could!
My client's response? "Linux totally cleaned up my system, and increased my speed!" All the PC repair professionals are using Linux to solve all of their problems. This should be reason enough for you to switch to Linux! It'll speed up your computer, rid it of all viruses, and you'll be able to work productively again! Wow!
Even if you're not having any obvious computer problems, you could still be in danger. That's why I very highly recommend that you still use Linux. After all, it will boost your PC & internet speed to levels you never would think are possible!
Bitcoin's role is only that it allowed the attackers to escape with the money.
And by "escape with the money" you mean transfer the money to known bitcoin addresses which have been traced forward to a few holding accounts before going into one of the exchanges. If the exchanges cared to invent some jurisdiction they could seize the funds (and why wouldn't they? Who's going to publicize the fact that the bitcoins they stole were frozen?). There are other services for laundering transactions that might not care if they abet a theft but I have no idea if their volume is sufficient to truly hide moving a large chunk of bitcoins through them.
If you're in the U.S. you can pay with cash since it's a debt that becomes due on a certain day of the month. Refusal to accept legal tender for repayment of a debt nullifies the debt.
Sure, so long as they're just protecting their own property from trespassing, staying within the bounds of proportional response, and not externalizing the cost of that protection onto others. It's their property, and they have the right to keep out trespassers.
Who's going to make sure that they stay within the bounds of proportional response and don't externalize the cost? More people with guns? Who pays them?
I would say the same here, but why would there be polls in the first place?
Unless you hope to negotiate international relations individually or not at all, you're going to need at least one elected representative.
First, "every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*" is nothing more than scare-mongering, especially compared to obvious injustice and violation of natural rights inherent in the nature of every government. Second, I'd rather deal with the responsibilities of liberty, even if it does mean dealing with some "evil", than personally participate in and legitimize a known evil.
So here's how I, as a private road owner, would operate it. Every morning I'd open an auction in each neighborhood to sell passes for roughly 95% of the expected traffic to enforce scarcity. Once those passes were sold, additional passes would only be available at much higher rates. Since, in general, it's very difficult to have more than two roads attached to every house I would have a monopoly on people's access to their jobs and the stores they need to access. Having that monopoly would allow me to extract arbitrary value from the residents. What, precisely, stops me from doing this in a free market economy? Competition? What if I buy a majority of the roads, which would be within my rights? Private ownership of everything is what occurred in feudal states. The richest owned the majority of the property and the serfs worked the land for a pittance. How would private ownership of everything be different in the U.S.? Or did you expect private citizens to invest all their capitol in the infrastructure of their own neighborhood and the road they take to their job? I buy electricity from a cooperative; they have an effective monopoly because no one would even dream of giving an easement to a new startup. The existing coop could always cut a sweet deal to the owners of the natural chokepoints in the grid to encourage them not to give the necessary easements for reaching customers who did want access to a new electrical company. A private electrical company has every right to deny backfeeding the grid or other unauthorized use of their lines and poles. Who regulates the natural monopolies?
It's within my natural rights to leave the country and effectively opt out of the taxation system. You were only defaulted in because of your parents' choices; you too are perfectly free to leave. It's also within my natural rights to enter into a contract with everyone else in my country to cooperatively manage the resources that I don't feel can be properly managed by private interests. I'm perfectly free; I simply choose to remain in this social contract. I fully support your right to buy a lot of available property and start your own privately owned city, but I don't think you'll have much luck doing it within the borders of the United States (or any other modern country) because by virtue of being within the borders you are automatically granted many federal protections (military, economic, judicial, etc.) that you would then be expected to pay federal income tax for. I hear you can generally buy islands from smaller countries, and presumably with enough money you could even offer to buy a portion of mainland from them to operate individually.
Sadly, I imagine you are stuck until science has progressed enough to either let you alter your sexual preferences or let other adults modify their bodies into a form you find attractive. So hold out for the singularity, I suppose. Good luck.
The problem with taxes isn't that no one likes them, because obviously some people do—mostly those on the receiving end. The problem is that others are forced to participate against their will. No amount of benefit to some is worth any amount of coercion against others.
What would you prefer? That men in guns stopped you from pulling out of your driveway if you didn't pay the toll for the road you were planning to drive on? That men in guns stopped you from entering a hospital unless you had enough money to pay? That men in guns stopped you from getting into the polls if you couldn't pay the fee to cover the cost of poll staff, vote counters, and the rented space? You weren't planning on just freeloading in an anarchist society, were you? Because ultimately the only thing that protects private property is a gun or some other threat of force. If the government isn't protecting its revenue with guns to pay for the services you desire it will be private individuals with guns preventing you from freeloading on their property or with their services. I'd much rather deal with a single known evil than every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*. Compare city or country regulations with the insanity that passes for housing covenants. Imagine a similar private covenant for literally everything you do, everywhere.
I mean seriously; armies need to make roads with gravel too. Just like they need a specific manufacturer's water purifier, which is worthy of slashdot's attention.
Why do people have children, when they know they will one day die?
Huh, I thought it was because the humans who didn't have a tendency to breed enough children got killed off by other humans' more numerous children, or all their children succumbed to injury or disease before they could reproduce.
I think the evolution of the concept of human worth justified the suffering after humans became consciously aware of it and allowed them to have more numerous children without the emotional/ethical baggage.
"good guy" and "file a DMCA" don't quite fit in the same paragraph, unless it also includes some form of negation. Seriously. Would you use RICO against an individual who wronged you? Would you send them to Guantanamo? Certain things just aren't done by "good people" even if they happen to be temporarily legal.
Well, for one thing, anyone who crawls the web will encounter the phrase "This chicken tastes like shit!", for instance at marcegan.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html. The first random character password only shows up on slashdot in google, and the second isn't even there yet.
If Google can crawl the public Internet a dedicated cracker can just try all short substrings of the public Internet.
Which gets me to the reason we tend to dismiss Ron Paul as a crazy person. What I wrote isn't remotely controversial. Banking has been a mess since it was invented - one of the core issues of our young country involved banking. We tried several national models, all of which had at least one spectacular failure. I'm under no delusion that the current Federal Reserve is the ultimate solution, but it seems to work better than it's predesessors. Ron Paul seems like a really intelligent guy, and he's also pretty well educated. So it really seems... odd... that he comes to the conclusions that he does on this matter. My conclusion is that his mind works in a way that is very different from my own. I could be the crazy one, but from my perspective he is the one drawing irrational conclusions.
I think probably the complexity of the Federal Reserve's actions are beyond the comprehension of a lot of people. I certainly don't understand it completely. Most people think the Fed "prints money" but from what I can tell that's only technically true when new cash or coins are required; the Federal Government is authorized to invest (effectively limitlessly) as they see fit, and by buying and selling short term bonds they are able to influence the money supply. This does not even require a Federal Government or Federal Reserve; all it requires is an entity with a big enough pool of money to influence the entire national (and potentially global) economy. An entity with control of a couple trillion dollars could probably do essentially the same job as the Fed, but they would probably be unmotivated to do so. In fact, an entity with a few trillion dollars to throw around almost exactly describes the Fed. Traditional money creation by fractional reserve lending is where the money supply actually comes from, afaik, and not directly from the Fed. The Fed simply tries to control the rate of money creation by being the biggest banks' largest customer. Deposit a lot of money, and presto the currency expands. Withdraw the money, and the currency shrinks. Ultimately as the economy grows the Fed itself requires a bigger pool of money to operate but afaik they always turn a profit simply by acting as the lender of last resort and facilitating the overnight loans between member banks. Forgive me if I get the details wrong but I did spend the last 10 or 20 years in the camp of people who essentially thought the Fed was busy churning out crisp new dollar bills or running while(1) { cash++; }.
All that said, I think Ron Paul probably opposes the idea of fractional reserve lending to begin with which probably influences his opinion on how the money supply should behave. Without fractional reserve lending the money supply doesn't inflate without ad-hoc printing or (importantly) the creation of currency directly backed by actual wealth. Examples of non-bank money creation are stock exchanges and monthly accounts-payable and accounts-receivable balances. There are other potentially viable options for managing the money supply, but I haven't really investigated how many of them Ron Paul has looked into or supports.
because nothing says I cannot walk right back out the front door.
Wrong. They've arrested people for trying to leave. It would make penetration testing much easier, e.g. pack a gun and only turn back only if it looks like the TSA is actually paying attention. They realize how incredibly weak their "screening" procedures are and that anything and everything would walk through the checkpoints if you could probe their "security" at will.
That's not how it works. You're responsible for your promises. That's why when the printer promises you it'll be done one month you plan for it to be done two months later, or something. And if you learn from past mistakes, then surely you can learn this lesson.
Interesting, it sounds like the business to be in is printing because then you do not have to keep your promises. Any other sweet industries where you can delay 100% without repercussion?
Slashdot Mirror
There was one major integer overflow in bitcoin that allowed a transaction to generate billions of new bitcoins. The network was resilient enough to abandon the original block number 74638. Assuming pool operators were notified soon enough a similar rollback would work in the future as well. It would have to be within a few blocks of the bad transaction or there would be a huge loss to people who performed legitimate transactions in the interim (or the client could just be patched to completely ignore the specific bad transactions and keep the original blockchain, but that would probably be less preferable in the long run).
If you disagree please tell me what body count YOU define as 'the line',
I would go farther back and see whether you blame the "progressive" north U.S.A. that wanted to control the south and happened to abolish slavery as an afterthought, or perhaps the "progressive" American Colonies that rebelled against the British empire. Probably it would have been better if everyone had sat around in the trees instead of coming down to farm. After all, ghengis khan wouldn't have gotten very far without horses, would he? The first single-celled organism's genotype was good enough for me. All this progressive multicellularism and biodiversity has just resulted in death and heartache.
How do I prove that I'm a U.S. citizen with only an out-of-state drivers' license? Bring a copy of my birth certificate? Or maybe being white non-hispanic will be a sufficient proof of my citizenship?
Just to feed the troll: The REnouveau team already has nVidia's code (minus comments). That is not sufficient to write a high quality driver because the code contains a subset of the hardware interface specification.
About six months ago, I was overexerting myself trying to get rid of a terrible virus on a client's PC (I own a PC repair shop and have been fixing computers for over 10 years). Given my level of expertise, I thought I'd be able to get rid of it fairly quickly and without hassle, but as was made evident by my colossal failure, I was horribly, horribly wrong.
I couldn't remove the virus no matter what method I used. I tried all the latest anti-virus software and all the usual tricks, but it was all in vain. Failure after failure, my life was slowly being sucked away as I spent more and more of my time trying to get rid of this otherworldly virus.
Frustrated and stressed by my own failure, I began distancing myself from my wife and children. After a few days, I began verbally abusing them, and it eventually escalated into physical abuse. I was slowly losing what remaining sanity I had left. If this had continued for much longer, it is highly probable that I would have committed suicide. A mere shell of what I once was, I barricaded myself in my bedroom and cried myself to sleep for days on end.
That's when it happened: I found Linux! I installed Linux right on the client's PC, ran a scan, and it immediately got rid of all the viruses without a single problem. Linux accomplished in record time what I was unable to accomplish after a full week. Wow! Such a thing!
Linux is outstanding! My client's computer is running faster than ever! I highly recommend you install Linux right this minuteness, run a scan, and then boost your PC speed in record time! Linux came through with flying colours where no one else could!
My client's response? "Linux totally cleaned up my system, and increased my speed!" All the PC repair professionals are using Linux to solve all of their problems. This should be reason enough for you to switch to Linux! It'll speed up your computer, rid it of all viruses, and you'll be able to work productively again! Wow!
Even if you're not having any obvious computer problems, you could still be in danger. That's why I very highly recommend that you still use Linux. After all, it will boost your PC & internet speed to levels you never would think are possible!
Linux: For a Cleaner, Safer PC.
Bitcoin's role is only that it allowed the attackers to escape with the money.
And by "escape with the money" you mean transfer the money to known bitcoin addresses which have been traced forward to a few holding accounts before going into one of the exchanges. If the exchanges cared to invent some jurisdiction they could seize the funds (and why wouldn't they? Who's going to publicize the fact that the bitcoins they stole were frozen?). There are other services for laundering transactions that might not care if they abet a theft but I have no idea if their volume is sufficient to truly hide moving a large chunk of bitcoins through them.
If you're in the U.S. you can pay with cash since it's a debt that becomes due on a certain day of the month. Refusal to accept legal tender for repayment of a debt nullifies the debt.
Sure, so long as they're just protecting their own property from trespassing, staying within the bounds of proportional response, and not externalizing the cost of that protection onto others. It's their property, and they have the right to keep out trespassers.
Who's going to make sure that they stay within the bounds of proportional response and don't externalize the cost? More people with guns? Who pays them?
I would say the same here, but why would there be polls in the first place?
Unless you hope to negotiate international relations individually or not at all, you're going to need at least one elected representative.
First, "every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*" is nothing more than scare-mongering, especially compared to obvious injustice and violation of natural rights inherent in the nature of every government. Second, I'd rather deal with the responsibilities of liberty, even if it does mean dealing with some "evil", than personally participate in and legitimize a known evil.
So here's how I, as a private road owner, would operate it. Every morning I'd open an auction in each neighborhood to sell passes for roughly 95% of the expected traffic to enforce scarcity. Once those passes were sold, additional passes would only be available at much higher rates. Since, in general, it's very difficult to have more than two roads attached to every house I would have a monopoly on people's access to their jobs and the stores they need to access. Having that monopoly would allow me to extract arbitrary value from the residents. What, precisely, stops me from doing this in a free market economy? Competition? What if I buy a majority of the roads, which would be within my rights? Private ownership of everything is what occurred in feudal states. The richest owned the majority of the property and the serfs worked the land for a pittance. How would private ownership of everything be different in the U.S.? Or did you expect private citizens to invest all their capitol in the infrastructure of their own neighborhood and the road they take to their job? I buy electricity from a cooperative; they have an effective monopoly because no one would even dream of giving an easement to a new startup. The existing coop could always cut a sweet deal to the owners of the natural chokepoints in the grid to encourage them not to give the necessary easements for reaching customers who did want access to a new electrical company. A private electrical company has every right to deny backfeeding the grid or other unauthorized use of their lines and poles. Who regulates the natural monopolies?
It's within my natural rights to leave the country and effectively opt out of the taxation system. You were only defaulted in because of your parents' choices; you too are perfectly free to leave. It's also within my natural rights to enter into a contract with everyone else in my country to cooperatively manage the resources that I don't feel can be properly managed by private interests. I'm perfectly free; I simply choose to remain in this social contract. I fully support your right to buy a lot of available property and start your own privately owned city, but I don't think you'll have much luck doing it within the borders of the United States (or any other modern country) because by virtue of being within the borders you are automatically granted many federal protections (military, economic, judicial, etc.) that you would then be expected to pay federal income tax for. I hear you can generally buy islands from smaller countries, and presumably with enough money you could even offer to buy a portion of mainland from them to operate individually.
Sadly, I imagine you are stuck until science has progressed enough to either let you alter your sexual preferences or let other adults modify their bodies into a form you find attractive. So hold out for the singularity, I suppose. Good luck.
The problem with taxes isn't that no one likes them, because obviously some people do—mostly those on the receiving end. The problem is that others are forced to participate against their will. No amount of benefit to some is worth any amount of coercion against others.
What would you prefer? That men in guns stopped you from pulling out of your driveway if you didn't pay the toll for the road you were planning to drive on? That men in guns stopped you from entering a hospital unless you had enough money to pay? That men in guns stopped you from getting into the polls if you couldn't pay the fee to cover the cost of poll staff, vote counters, and the rented space? You weren't planning on just freeloading in an anarchist society, were you? Because ultimately the only thing that protects private property is a gun or some other threat of force. If the government isn't protecting its revenue with guns to pay for the services you desire it will be private individuals with guns preventing you from freeloading on their property or with their services. I'd much rather deal with a single known evil than every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*. Compare city or country regulations with the insanity that passes for housing covenants. Imagine a similar private covenant for literally everything you do, everywhere.
I mean seriously; armies need to make roads with gravel too. Just like they need a specific manufacturer's water purifier, which is worthy of slashdot's attention.
Why do people have children, when they know they will one day die?
Huh, I thought it was because the humans who didn't have a tendency to breed enough children got killed off by other humans' more numerous children, or all their children succumbed to injury or disease before they could reproduce.
I think the evolution of the concept of human worth justified the suffering after humans became consciously aware of it and allowed them to have more numerous children without the emotional/ethical baggage.
So in Hell I will do such advanced mathematics and science and have so much sex that I literally die? And then I get to do it all over again?
How do I sign up?
Precisely. You are following Peter, Paul, and other people; not Jesus.
So it's okay if you get sent to Gauntanamo for a few months so long as they let you out once they believe that you're innocent?
Ah, yes, "presumption of guilt until proven innocent" is definitely a good process.
"good guy" and "file a DMCA" don't quite fit in the same paragraph, unless it also includes some form of negation. Seriously. Would you use RICO against an individual who wronged you? Would you send them to Guantanamo? Certain things just aren't done by "good people" even if they happen to be temporarily legal.
Well, for one thing, anyone who crawls the web will encounter the phrase "This chicken tastes like shit!", for instance at marcegan.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html. The first random character password only shows up on slashdot in google, and the second isn't even there yet.
If Google can crawl the public Internet a dedicated cracker can just try all short substrings of the public Internet.
Even at 1,000,000 crack attempts per second, it still takes on average 16 years to crack a password formulated using either method. way.
Try a billion attempts per second with a single GPU. A maximum of 15 days.
Which gets me to the reason we tend to dismiss Ron Paul as a crazy person. What I wrote isn't remotely controversial. Banking has been a mess since it was invented - one of the core issues of our young country involved banking. We tried several national models, all of which had at least one spectacular failure. I'm under no delusion that the current Federal Reserve is the ultimate solution, but it seems to work better than it's predesessors. Ron Paul seems like a really intelligent guy, and he's also pretty well educated. So it really seems... odd... that he comes to the conclusions that he does on this matter. My conclusion is that his mind works in a way that is very different from my own. I could be the crazy one, but from my perspective he is the one drawing irrational conclusions.
I think probably the complexity of the Federal Reserve's actions are beyond the comprehension of a lot of people. I certainly don't understand it completely. Most people think the Fed "prints money" but from what I can tell that's only technically true when new cash or coins are required; the Federal Government is authorized to invest (effectively limitlessly) as they see fit, and by buying and selling short term bonds they are able to influence the money supply. This does not even require a Federal Government or Federal Reserve; all it requires is an entity with a big enough pool of money to influence the entire national (and potentially global) economy. An entity with control of a couple trillion dollars could probably do essentially the same job as the Fed, but they would probably be unmotivated to do so. In fact, an entity with a few trillion dollars to throw around almost exactly describes the Fed. Traditional money creation by fractional reserve lending is where the money supply actually comes from, afaik, and not directly from the Fed. The Fed simply tries to control the rate of money creation by being the biggest banks' largest customer. Deposit a lot of money, and presto the currency expands. Withdraw the money, and the currency shrinks. Ultimately as the economy grows the Fed itself requires a bigger pool of money to operate but afaik they always turn a profit simply by acting as the lender of last resort and facilitating the overnight loans between member banks. Forgive me if I get the details wrong but I did spend the last 10 or 20 years in the camp of people who essentially thought the Fed was busy churning out crisp new dollar bills or running while(1) { cash++; }.
All that said, I think Ron Paul probably opposes the idea of fractional reserve lending to begin with which probably influences his opinion on how the money supply should behave. Without fractional reserve lending the money supply doesn't inflate without ad-hoc printing or (importantly) the creation of currency directly backed by actual wealth. Examples of non-bank money creation are stock exchanges and monthly accounts-payable and accounts-receivable balances. There are other potentially viable options for managing the money supply, but I haven't really investigated how many of them Ron Paul has looked into or supports.
If enough people stop flying then the TSA will have a bunch of over-employment and beg Congress to search busses and trains.
You should also always be engaging in tit-for-tat or you'll be completely raped by everyone you have to deal with.
"You want to touch my balls or shove me in a waveguide? This will not be pleasant for you, either."
because nothing says I cannot walk right back out the front door.
Wrong. They've arrested people for trying to leave. It would make penetration testing much easier, e.g. pack a gun and only turn back only if it looks like the TSA is actually paying attention. They realize how incredibly weak their "screening" procedures are and that anything and everything would walk through the checkpoints if you could probe their "security" at will.
"NO BAGGAGE ON FLIGHTS! Buy your new clothes and toiletries at the nearest Walmart when you arrive!"
Or even better "Flight outlawed!"
That's not how it works. You're responsible for your promises. That's why when the printer promises you it'll be done one month you plan for it to be done two months later, or something. And if you learn from past mistakes, then surely you can learn this lesson.
Interesting, it sounds like the business to be in is printing because then you do not have to keep your promises. Any other sweet industries where you can delay 100% without repercussion?