I don't think Postgres HA should be something that plugs in to Linux HA or similar. That is passing the buck. You should not have to count on other HA solutions to 'know' about Postgres or vice versa. It should be able to take care of its own business. That is what the other DB solutions out there do. And they are far more successful with it. That is why people trust those other DBs for HA more than they do Postgres.
And believe me, I really do like most aspects of Postgres, but the security and HA aspects are show stoppers for me. The HA more than the security with me, but I know others I have worked with have almost 'lost it' because of the Postgres security model. And then in steps MySQL (unfortunately).
I don't think MySQL is generally robust enough for major implementations, but its security model and replication/HA are head and shoulders above Postgres's; and yes I know that isn't saying much, but it is enough for just about anyone else I've worked with when it came to choosing open source DBs. And when all the other devs want something other than Postgres because they hate the security model and the lack of ready for prime time HA, and the PM sees more press about MySQL than Postgres (i.e. the PM says, "I've never heard of Postgres"), then in comes MySQL, and out goes Postgres.
I think the Postgres team really needs to stop worrying about just about every other feature request until they have a much better point in time data recovery model (required for HA... and from some of the technical seminars I've watched, is why HA is not very good), AND a self contained and ready for prime time HA solution that does automatic cut over, AND... until it has a really clean and industry/standards standard security model (and please don't knit pick about 'what is standard anyway'.... I'm sure you know what I am talking about... make it at least close to what the others are doing so people don't freak out trying to figure out how postgres does it... since it is the only one this 'far out').
I don't think writing a script to cover the last step of switching in the even of failure as a viable option. The architecture should be able to sense that the primary has gone down, and the secondary/slave should become the primary automatically and immediately. That is what HA is supposed to do.
Setting up security I find to be tedious etc. What bothers me is the pretty non standard way of working with data. With just about every other database out there, once you log in to the server, as long as you have permissions granted to a schema that is not your default, all you need to do is reference schema_name.table_name, nothing else. And as for your default schema you should only have to reference the table_name. And in fact, regardless of schemas, if there are no conflicts in table names between schemas you have permissions on, you shouldn't really even have to use the schema reference in that case either. (If your app uses multiple schemas, and say you want to use a different dev schemas or testing schemas, you should not have to change the schema_name references in your queries, dml, etc.). It seems like I am constantly finding Postgres 'gotchas' with this aspect that get in the way, and sometimes prevent generic coding of procedures, sql, and dml. Now as for the hba conf file.... grrrrrrrr! What a waste of time. If you don't want to give access, don't let people log into the box and don't give them database user and/or permissions for f sake. That hba conf is just plain useless cruft. Any other config (like with Ker... ) should be done in the main config file.
I have to agree with about the brutality of the Postgres security model. It is fucking horrible. It seems to work so incredibly different than everything else, and just seems to put a ton of horrible roadblocks in front of the programmers. The new replication stuff is also pretty rough around the edges and there is a lack of high availability built in. As are items like differential backups and restores (at least compared to DBs like Oracle, MS SQL Server, and DB2). The core database aspects of it are excellent. But as much as I really like it as a DB system, if I were to recommend a system I would have to go to one of the proprietary DBs, then Postgres, then MySQL. And if you needed high availability MySQL would be before Postgres. If Postgres could clean up security and high availability failover, then it would be a go to DBMS. High availability features are really a no brainer requirement these days. All said and done, for home projects for learning, I use Postgres. Not for money projects as yet. Feel free to slag away at this, everyone has an asshole... I mean an opinion.:P
How the fuck is this insightful?! Granted I have no love of Oracle or Ellison. In fact I wouldn't shed a tear if the guy disappeared off the face of the earth. But to say that Sun wouldn't sue anyone is fucking retarded. Sun protected their patents every bit as hard as any other company out there, including Oracle. In fact you may have noticed that Sun also did not ever want to give up control of the Java platform, and only became more inclusive with the community as their financial fortunes waned. And very likely it was only in some hope that it would help them keep them competitive by leveraging the good faith of long term developers who could have some leverage over what systems the companies they work/worked for would buy. Obviously even this did not work. Stop sipping the electric Kool-aid boy, your razor is about as sharp as a wet piece of turd on this one.
The RIM CEOs have more money than they could possibly need in one life... by orders of magnitude; as long as they're not complete idiots. And considering they started the secure handset market (android and iphone/ipad still aren't secure) and the messaging handset in general, they are NOT idiots. Lazaridis started RIM (with a couple of other guys) as a tech startup in Waterloo, ON. Canada where he previously attended The University of Waterloo, and eventually served as chancellor (it has one of the top engineering faculties in Canada). Balsillie is the business school grad.
The only reason they are still in it (in my opinion), like most CEOs, is for the feelings of power and control. Most CEOs are narcissists and often sociopaths. Even if they don't start that way, the power eventually goes to their heads and they end up that way. Take Balsillie and his quest to bully the NHL for a franchise for example. "I have a lot of money and I deserve a team." No need to look further.
I do believe RIM needs fresh thinking at the top. They are beginning to "Novell". i.e. The company starts thinking and acting like, "we are the big boys and we don't have to work as hard to make things easy and innovative for our customers." Meanwhile the competitors see the holes in RIM's thinking and take advantage of new and fresh trends in technology to beat down RIM's market share. Kind of like winning the last war... the winners think they can win the next war with the technology and tactics that they used for the last one (perhaps the biggest exception to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" axiom). The losers know they need to think of a better way to do things. That was why Germany kicked the crap out of the allies at the beginning of WWII after losing WWI. Good thing they were run by madmen who believed "Pyrrhic victories/Cadmean victories were real victories... and for the North American supply lines where factories were out of harm's way. Anyway you get my point: fresh thinking is probably a good thing, and from a distance looks like a good idea to implement at RIM.
To Lazaridis's credit, he has stayed in Waterloo where he went to university and started RIM (he even goes for lunch some times at local restaurants... and not the steakhouse variety... although I am sure he frequents those too:). More than half of RIM's employees are located there, and up till lately they had hired a few thousand more to work in Waterloo in the last two or three years (yes they have some offshore employees but they are a bit of an anomaly considering the number of jobs percentage-wise which they created in North America... mostly in Waterloo where it was started... as opposed to in Asia). Lazaridis founded one of the top theoretical physics institutes in the world in Waterloo with his own money to the tune of $400M to $500M (The Perimeter Institute), and which hosted Steven Hawking for a 6 month stint there last year. They have done a lot for Waterloo, forming the kernel of a high tech industry there (OpenText is another of many companies that is headquartered in Waterloo which started as a tech startup).
Bottom line is that money is not the issue. Besides, when have you ever seen a CEO not be able to drive a company into the ground and not get hired to do the same thing elsewhere. Big money CEOs belong to a well established "old boys club" where ability means nothing... only who you know counts.
No I don't work for RIM, nor have I ever worked for RIM. I don't like rim jobs... yuck yuck yuck... I'm here all week, try the veal. (But seriously, I am in no way affiliated with RIM, nor do I own a Crackberry.)
I stopped including stock options into what I consider adequate compensation for a job a long time ago. I look at the dollar salary or hourly contractor pay as the only factor in judging compensation. Stock options are a nice to have, but in the end I never count on them paying off. I've been around when stocks fall below the price they were when I started somewhere (companies can gain market share but fickle markets do funny things... e.g. they've maxed out the market so can't grow any more but even though they are making the same profit year over year we don't think they are worth as much since they can't grow as fast as before.... etc etc etc) or when companies want to put clauses like this into the package. So I don't let them wow me with phrases like, "but we offer great stock options" when talking to the recruiters. I prefer the "show me the money" conversation. Now-a-days I believe "stock options" are just a way to pay you less and to try to rope the naive into staying at shitty companies.
It's not like the Japanese are all that proactive or effective about safety and security. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has made that abundantly clear. Perhaps too much rigid hierarchical thought processes.
There was a lawsuit a few years ago in the U.S. where precedent was set for Constructive Dismissal a.k.a, Constructive Discharge. This is when a company makes it so unbearable to work there, the employee has to quit. This is treated as unfair or wrongful dismissal, and the employee can sue the company as such. I remember reading about this when I lived in the U.S. where a woman sued her former employer under this concept and won. From what I gather it is a good idea to talk to a lawyer before you quit if you are going to try this.
The license plate on the black car didn't look like it was any clearer when zoomed in. Nor the writing on the signs. It seems more like it is taken with an extreme depth of field and then the system selectively focuses/defocuses areas of the picture. I very likely could be wrong, but that is how it seems to me from just this small demo.
My question is: why did he get fired? Everyone is saying they are so happy he did this, but what if he really did deserve to get fired? If he didn't deserve it, then good on him. But we don't know both sides of the story. At least I missed it in TFA.
Web developers can't and won't use new features in browsers released every 2-3 months.
As a web developer, you already know that we do all our coding for the lowest common denominator... Firefox can implement all the fancy features it wants, and neither of us can really use it.
What's bullshit? You just said the same thing as the main point of your parent's post, just worded differently. Other than that, your parent poster is just ranting about a 2 month release schedule because as you both point out, not many web devs will worry about supporting because as you say, it is a pain in the ass to support more than the lowest common denominator. His rant is every bit as valid as you ranting against his/her ranting.
You don't understand Blackberry. Companies do not use Blackberries the same way individual consumers who purchase service from a phone company use Blackberries. BTW the individual consumer model is also the way iPhones and Android phones work. The consumer model has no way of providing secure communication. The corporate model does.
Each company using Blackberries has a Blackberry server at their company that talks to their email servers. RIM doesn't have access to this data. The data is then encrypted and passed back and forth to the Blackberry devices. Again, RIM doesn't have access to this data because it is encrypted. Only emails to public addresses are accessible. iPhones and Android phones do not have a way to provide secure communication within a company using their devices as RIM/Blackberry does, and this is why iPhones and Android phones are NOT suitable for business. And then there is Google mail where you are just giving them your data to mine.
Internal company emails sent by Blackberry are not accessible/readable by anyone outside the company, including RIM. i.e. Company emails are confidential. Google emails are not confidential, and Google will know everything that you discuss about your company that is in your emails, even if the emails are between employees of said company. If you are happy with sharing confidential information with Google, then go ahead. Most companies of any size are not.
I find my google calendar on my HTC Desire much nicer.
Most corporations don't want Google or any other outside company knowing the details of their internal operations including meetings and the subject of those meetings. That is why they use Blackberries, since the info is not held on RIM servers, but only on the corporation's servers. If I owned a company I would never allow employees to schedule meetings on Google Calendar. In fact, I would make that a firing offence. Company business is company business, and nobody else's; including Google's. Whoever comes out with a way to keep information secret for companies the way RIM does, they will be able to put the nail in RIM's coffin.
Hey, I heard they found 30 dead bodies at a farm in Texas. (Newspaper One: "According to Radio1 police have found 30 dead bodies..." Radio1: "According to TV2 police have found 30 bodies..." TV2: "According to Newspaper One, police have found 30 bodies..." Police: "Some nutbar who says she's a 'prophetess' says she 'saw' 30 bodies at a farm, but nobody asked us what we thought or found... go figure!"
Do you see a pattern? Who the hell trusts reporters and news organisations who won't bother to fact check themselves (and no, the other news channels don't count as sources). How about these local 'news organisations' actually find some news to report instead of going after the low hanging fruit.
diamonds do to some degree also, but nothing near what people pay for them
And there is the crux: things are only worth what people are willing to pay. If people are willing to pay a lot for diamonds or gold, then they are worth a lot. The same goes for bitcoins. Personally, I'm not sure what I think of bitcoins myself yet, but they are not free to make. As the article states, you need to pay hardware and electricity costs in order to generate a bitcoin, so they aren't free. At the moment, the article states that you can at best break even if you have the right hardware.
Sure diamonds are partly worth a lot because the mining company hoards most of them. But if they weren't shiny and pretty, it wouldn't matter how many they hoarded, people wouldn't value them. The bottom line is that things that people put a value on, will have value. You can work all day long making buggy whips, but go broke because not enough people value buggy whips any more (i.e. your units of work are worthless in this case). Or why is a Ferrari worth more than Kia? They are essentially the same mechanism. It is even likely that they will last the same number of miles/kilometres (assuming a Ferrari driver wants to drive the car into the ground). Sure the Ferrari has added features, but is it really worth $100,000.00 or more than a Kia, given that the parts aren't that different, the assembly time is not all that different, they both get you from point A to point B, etc. etc.? The Ferrari is worth more because people are willing to pay proportionally more for it than the sum of it parts and labour etc. So if people decide for the long term to put value in bitcoins they will. That's all there is to it.
What makes me wonder to some degree is that it all boils down to encryption. And I believe there are two main types of ciphers: those that have not been broken, and those that will be. Given gains in quantum computing and other technology, what means have they built in to manage things in case someone manages to break the encryption bitcoin relies on (and I am not a security expert so don't kill me if I don't get the terms right, as long as you understand my intent).
There are many cases where they need to maintain privacy. For example, quite often it is necessary to keep facts of some cases secret until a suspect is arrested, as release of the information could compromise the instigation. I'd rather the bad guys not be tipped off because someone was so dogmatic the were unable to be reasonable. Sure, eventually, and as soon as possible, all facts of police activity should be made public. But sometimes, privacy is necessary. Also, remember that police are people too. Sometimes they have their own private conversations.
I am not a lawyer. But I think it is more than that. The same laws that allow people to video or photograph things going on in public should apply unless the police are doing something in a place that allows them an expectation of privacy. Otherwise they are in public. If I am correct, I believe that if you video or take pictures in public, people cannot come after you monetarily since they had no expectation of privacy.
In Canada, the supreme court ruled (and this is my understanding of it) that if there is enough of a social benefit, the privacy of a person is outweighed. I pretty sure that applies for photos taken in public and possibly in private. This is why newsworthy photos and video are covered, and usually where other people are incidental to a photo (i.e. part of the background crowd). But if you take a picture of someone and try to sell the picture for your own profit (even if you call it 'art'), you need explicit consent. When I did a lot of photography, I would always carry model releases in my camera bag just in case there was an interesting shot of someone. It came in handy a couple of times.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Postgres HA should be something that plugs in to Linux HA or similar. That is passing the buck. You should not have to count on other HA solutions to 'know' about Postgres or vice versa. It should be able to take care of its own business. That is what the other DB solutions out there do. And they are far more successful with it. That is why people trust those other DBs for HA more than they do Postgres.
And believe me, I really do like most aspects of Postgres, but the security and HA aspects are show stoppers for me. The HA more than the security with me, but I know others I have worked with have almost 'lost it' because of the Postgres security model. And then in steps MySQL (unfortunately).
I don't think MySQL is generally robust enough for major implementations, but its security model and replication/HA are head and shoulders above Postgres's; and yes I know that isn't saying much, but it is enough for just about anyone else I've worked with when it came to choosing open source DBs. And when all the other devs want something other than Postgres because they hate the security model and the lack of ready for prime time HA, and the PM sees more press about MySQL than Postgres (i.e. the PM says, "I've never heard of Postgres"), then in comes MySQL, and out goes Postgres.
I think the Postgres team really needs to stop worrying about just about every other feature request until they have a much better point in time data recovery model (required for HA... and from some of the technical seminars I've watched, is why HA is not very good), AND a self contained and ready for prime time HA solution that does automatic cut over, AND... until it has a really clean and industry/standards standard security model (and please don't knit pick about 'what is standard anyway'.... I'm sure you know what I am talking about... make it at least close to what the others are doing so people don't freak out trying to figure out how postgres does it... since it is the only one this 'far out').
I don't think writing a script to cover the last step of switching in the even of failure as a viable option. The architecture should be able to sense that the primary has gone down, and the secondary/slave should become the primary automatically and immediately. That is what HA is supposed to do.
Setting up security I find to be tedious etc. What bothers me is the pretty non standard way of working with data. With just about every other database out there, once you log in to the server, as long as you have permissions granted to a schema that is not your default, all you need to do is reference schema_name.table_name, nothing else. And as for your default schema you should only have to reference the table_name. And in fact, regardless of schemas, if there are no conflicts in table names between schemas you have permissions on, you shouldn't really even have to use the schema reference in that case either. (If your app uses multiple schemas, and say you want to use a different dev schemas or testing schemas, you should not have to change the schema_name references in your queries, dml, etc.). It seems like I am constantly finding Postgres 'gotchas' with this aspect that get in the way, and sometimes prevent generic coding of procedures, sql, and dml. Now as for the hba conf file.... grrrrrrrr! What a waste of time. If you don't want to give access, don't let people log into the box and don't give them database user and/or permissions for f sake. That hba conf is just plain useless cruft. Any other config (like with Ker... ) should be done in the main config file.
I have to agree with about the brutality of the Postgres security model. It is fucking horrible. It seems to work so incredibly different than everything else, and just seems to put a ton of horrible roadblocks in front of the programmers. The new replication stuff is also pretty rough around the edges and there is a lack of high availability built in. As are items like differential backups and restores (at least compared to DBs like Oracle, MS SQL Server, and DB2). The core database aspects of it are excellent. But as much as I really like it as a DB system, if I were to recommend a system I would have to go to one of the proprietary DBs, then Postgres, then MySQL. And if you needed high availability MySQL would be before Postgres. If Postgres could clean up security and high availability failover, then it would be a go to DBMS. High availability features are really a no brainer requirement these days. All said and done, for home projects for learning, I use Postgres. Not for money projects as yet. Feel free to slag away at this, everyone has an asshole... I mean an opinion. :P
WTF? I didn't see three phase circuits.
What if you use lower case L's instead of 1's?
How the fuck is this insightful?! Granted I have no love of Oracle or Ellison. In fact I wouldn't shed a tear if the guy disappeared off the face of the earth. But to say that Sun wouldn't sue anyone is fucking retarded. Sun protected their patents every bit as hard as any other company out there, including Oracle. In fact you may have noticed that Sun also did not ever want to give up control of the Java platform, and only became more inclusive with the community as their financial fortunes waned. And very likely it was only in some hope that it would help them keep them competitive by leveraging the good faith of long term developers who could have some leverage over what systems the companies they work/worked for would buy. Obviously even this did not work. Stop sipping the electric Kool-aid boy, your razor is about as sharp as a wet piece of turd on this one.
Oh, and look at the dancing ponies!!! Aren't they pretty?
The RIM CEOs have more money than they could possibly need in one life... by orders of magnitude; as long as they're not complete idiots. And considering they started the secure handset market (android and iphone/ipad still aren't secure) and the messaging handset in general, they are NOT idiots. Lazaridis started RIM (with a couple of other guys) as a tech startup in Waterloo, ON. Canada where he previously attended The University of Waterloo, and eventually served as chancellor (it has one of the top engineering faculties in Canada). Balsillie is the business school grad.
The only reason they are still in it (in my opinion), like most CEOs, is for the feelings of power and control. Most CEOs are narcissists and often sociopaths. Even if they don't start that way, the power eventually goes to their heads and they end up that way. Take Balsillie and his quest to bully the NHL for a franchise for example. "I have a lot of money and I deserve a team." No need to look further.
I do believe RIM needs fresh thinking at the top. They are beginning to "Novell". i.e. The company starts thinking and acting like, "we are the big boys and we don't have to work as hard to make things easy and innovative for our customers." Meanwhile the competitors see the holes in RIM's thinking and take advantage of new and fresh trends in technology to beat down RIM's market share. Kind of like winning the last war... the winners think they can win the next war with the technology and tactics that they used for the last one (perhaps the biggest exception to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" axiom). The losers know they need to think of a better way to do things. That was why Germany kicked the crap out of the allies at the beginning of WWII after losing WWI. Good thing they were run by madmen who believed "Pyrrhic victories/Cadmean victories were real victories... and for the North American supply lines where factories were out of harm's way. Anyway you get my point: fresh thinking is probably a good thing, and from a distance looks like a good idea to implement at RIM.
To Lazaridis's credit, he has stayed in Waterloo where he went to university and started RIM (he even goes for lunch some times at local restaurants... and not the steakhouse variety... although I am sure he frequents those too :). More than half of RIM's employees are located there, and up till lately they had hired a few thousand more to work in Waterloo in the last two or three years (yes they have some offshore employees but they are a bit of an anomaly considering the number of jobs percentage-wise which they created in North America... mostly in Waterloo where it was started... as opposed to in Asia). Lazaridis founded one of the top theoretical physics institutes in the world in Waterloo with his own money to the tune of $400M to $500M (The Perimeter Institute), and which hosted Steven Hawking for a 6 month stint there last year. They have done a lot for Waterloo, forming the kernel of a high tech industry there (OpenText is another of many companies that is headquartered in Waterloo which started as a tech startup).
Bottom line is that money is not the issue. Besides, when have you ever seen a CEO not be able to drive a company into the ground and not get hired to do the same thing elsewhere. Big money CEOs belong to a well established "old boys club" where ability means nothing... only who you know counts.
No I don't work for RIM, nor have I ever worked for RIM. I don't like rim jobs ... yuck yuck yuck... I'm here all week, try the veal. (But seriously, I am in no way affiliated with RIM, nor do I own a Crackberry.)
Fuck I'm hungry now. I think I'll have a donnerburger. Damn, the flood washed out my BBQ pit. I would have fixed it but it was snowed in last winter.
Now I don't have to find ways to make my hand go numb. It will feel like someone else automatically.
I stopped including stock options into what I consider adequate compensation for a job a long time ago. I look at the dollar salary or hourly contractor pay as the only factor in judging compensation. Stock options are a nice to have, but in the end I never count on them paying off. I've been around when stocks fall below the price they were when I started somewhere (companies can gain market share but fickle markets do funny things... e.g. they've maxed out the market so can't grow any more but even though they are making the same profit year over year we don't think they are worth as much since they can't grow as fast as before.... etc etc etc) or when companies want to put clauses like this into the package. So I don't let them wow me with phrases like, "but we offer great stock options" when talking to the recruiters. I prefer the "show me the money" conversation. Now-a-days I believe "stock options" are just a way to pay you less and to try to rope the naive into staying at shitty companies.
It's not like the Japanese are all that proactive or effective about safety and security. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has made that abundantly clear. Perhaps too much rigid hierarchical thought processes.
There was a lawsuit a few years ago in the U.S. where precedent was set for Constructive Dismissal a.k.a, Constructive Discharge. This is when a company makes it so unbearable to work there, the employee has to quit. This is treated as unfair or wrongful dismissal, and the employee can sue the company as such. I remember reading about this when I lived in the U.S. where a woman sued her former employer under this concept and won. From what I gather it is a good idea to talk to a lawyer before you quit if you are going to try this.
The license plate on the black car didn't look like it was any clearer when zoomed in. Nor the writing on the signs. It seems more like it is taken with an extreme depth of field and then the system selectively focuses/defocuses areas of the picture. I very likely could be wrong, but that is how it seems to me from just this small demo.
My question is: why did he get fired? Everyone is saying they are so happy he did this, but what if he really did deserve to get fired? If he didn't deserve it, then good on him. But we don't know both sides of the story. At least I missed it in TFA.
What's bullshit? You just said the same thing as the main point of your parent's post, just worded differently. Other than that, your parent poster is just ranting about a 2 month release schedule because as you both point out, not many web devs will worry about supporting because as you say, it is a pain in the ass to support more than the lowest common denominator. His rant is every bit as valid as you ranting against his/her ranting.
You don't understand Blackberry. Companies do not use Blackberries the same way individual consumers who purchase service from a phone company use Blackberries. BTW the individual consumer model is also the way iPhones and Android phones work. The consumer model has no way of providing secure communication. The corporate model does.
Each company using Blackberries has a Blackberry server at their company that talks to their email servers. RIM doesn't have access to this data. The data is then encrypted and passed back and forth to the Blackberry devices. Again, RIM doesn't have access to this data because it is encrypted. Only emails to public addresses are accessible. iPhones and Android phones do not have a way to provide secure communication within a company using their devices as RIM/Blackberry does, and this is why iPhones and Android phones are NOT suitable for business. And then there is Google mail where you are just giving them your data to mine.
Internal company emails sent by Blackberry are not accessible/readable by anyone outside the company, including RIM. i.e. Company emails are confidential. Google emails are not confidential, and Google will know everything that you discuss about your company that is in your emails, even if the emails are between employees of said company. If you are happy with sharing confidential information with Google, then go ahead. Most companies of any size are not.
Most corporations don't want Google or any other outside company knowing the details of their internal operations including meetings and the subject of those meetings. That is why they use Blackberries, since the info is not held on RIM servers, but only on the corporation's servers. If I owned a company I would never allow employees to schedule meetings on Google Calendar. In fact, I would make that a firing offence. Company business is company business, and nobody else's; including Google's. Whoever comes out with a way to keep information secret for companies the way RIM does, they will be able to put the nail in RIM's coffin.
Microsoft Antitrust Case
1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
4) Profit
FTFY
Hey, I heard they found 30 dead bodies at a farm in Texas. (Newspaper One: "According to Radio1 police have found 30 dead bodies..." Radio1: "According to TV2 police have found 30 bodies..." TV2: "According to Newspaper One, police have found 30 bodies..." Police: "Some nutbar who says she's a 'prophetess' says she 'saw' 30 bodies at a farm, but nobody asked us what we thought or found... go figure!"
Do you see a pattern? Who the hell trusts reporters and news organisations who won't bother to fact check themselves (and no, the other news channels don't count as sources). How about these local 'news organisations' actually find some news to report instead of going after the low hanging fruit.
I wonder if they could integrate it with a Microsoft Kinect. It scans you at home, and then the robot adjusts to your size based on the Kinect scan.
And there is the crux: things are only worth what people are willing to pay. If people are willing to pay a lot for diamonds or gold, then they are worth a lot. The same goes for bitcoins. Personally, I'm not sure what I think of bitcoins myself yet, but they are not free to make. As the article states, you need to pay hardware and electricity costs in order to generate a bitcoin, so they aren't free. At the moment, the article states that you can at best break even if you have the right hardware.
Sure diamonds are partly worth a lot because the mining company hoards most of them. But if they weren't shiny and pretty, it wouldn't matter how many they hoarded, people wouldn't value them. The bottom line is that things that people put a value on, will have value. You can work all day long making buggy whips, but go broke because not enough people value buggy whips any more (i.e. your units of work are worthless in this case). Or why is a Ferrari worth more than Kia? They are essentially the same mechanism. It is even likely that they will last the same number of miles/kilometres (assuming a Ferrari driver wants to drive the car into the ground). Sure the Ferrari has added features, but is it really worth $100,000.00 or more than a Kia, given that the parts aren't that different, the assembly time is not all that different, they both get you from point A to point B, etc. etc.? The Ferrari is worth more because people are willing to pay proportionally more for it than the sum of it parts and labour etc. So if people decide for the long term to put value in bitcoins they will. That's all there is to it.
What makes me wonder to some degree is that it all boils down to encryption. And I believe there are two main types of ciphers: those that have not been broken, and those that will be. Given gains in quantum computing and other technology, what means have they built in to manage things in case someone manages to break the encryption bitcoin relies on (and I am not a security expert so don't kill me if I don't get the terms right, as long as you understand my intent).
There are many cases where they need to maintain privacy. For example, quite often it is necessary to keep facts of some cases secret until a suspect is arrested, as release of the information could compromise the instigation. I'd rather the bad guys not be tipped off because someone was so dogmatic the were unable to be reasonable. Sure, eventually, and as soon as possible, all facts of police activity should be made public. But sometimes, privacy is necessary. Also, remember that police are people too. Sometimes they have their own private conversations.
I am not a lawyer. But I think it is more than that. The same laws that allow people to video or photograph things going on in public should apply unless the police are doing something in a place that allows them an expectation of privacy. Otherwise they are in public. If I am correct, I believe that if you video or take pictures in public, people cannot come after you monetarily since they had no expectation of privacy.
In Canada, the supreme court ruled (and this is my understanding of it) that if there is enough of a social benefit, the privacy of a person is outweighed. I pretty sure that applies for photos taken in public and possibly in private. This is why newsworthy photos and video are covered, and usually where other people are incidental to a photo (i.e. part of the background crowd). But if you take a picture of someone and try to sell the picture for your own profit (even if you call it 'art'), you need explicit consent. When I did a lot of photography, I would always carry model releases in my camera bag just in case there was an interesting shot of someone. It came in handy a couple of times.