The visuals in Hackers were completely unrealistic - but they avoided the ire of programmers, and the inevitable dating of their film, by instead mostly going for a kind of interpretive mindscape video, instead of attempting to realistically represent the process of hacking.
I like to think that someone in production design actually went out and researched what hacking looked like.. and instead decided to talk to people about what hacking FELT like.
They'd have to have the same characteristics as cash, which include some measures so that you can be sure they aren't forgeries.
Alas, this is not possible with Bitcoin. As a transaction log, the only thing a "wallet" is is a private key. A paper wallet, for example, is just a particular encoding of that key on a piece of paper. The key is all that's needed to transfer the balance to another key - ie, spend the Bitcoin.
The person who created that wallet could easily have another copy of the private key, therefore you don't have any assurance of the value of a given wallet until you have successfully transferred it's balance to another wallet that you exclusively control. You should treat all paper wallets and any other novelty means of storing wallets offline as potentially valueless - it's only the completed transaction that has value.
You can't "hand out" Bitcoins. Bitcoin is a consensus. To subvert Bitcoin, you'd have to deploy computing power in excess of all that already spent on the blockchain, which is unlikely or impossible even for the US Government.
Your scenario where there are "fake" Bitcoins in "circulation" isn't possible because it's not cash. It's a transaction log, and because it uses the participation of all the Bitcoin peers to verify that it's legitimate, it's virtually impossible to forge, unlike physical cash.
There's nothing special you'd have to do to have an international Bitcoin - it's already international, because it's based on maths, and not the threat of force as per fiat currencies backed by governments.
It's a shame it's a toy implementation that won't actually scale.
It requires you to be online to make transactions, can't make rapid transactions, isn't anonymous (or at least is much less anonymous) and isn't a physical object.
No, you can't. This ill-informed troll keeps cropping up, but it's just a total misconception about how it all works.
Bitcoin is a vast distributed transaction log. The only thing you store in that wallet is a private key. The coins are out there in the transaction log. The key just identifies the ones that you own. Only the holder of the private key can produce a transaction signed with that key, which is what is required to transfer the coins to another holder.
When you spend BTC, you create a transaction record and sign it with that key. That transaction then enters the Bitcoin network and peers verify whether it's correct or not. Whichever transaction gets consensus first wins - even if you created 100 transactions spending the same coin, only one of them will succeed.
Being dumb enough to believe that your transaction is good without this verification is equally as dumb as believing that an IOU from a random stranger you've never met before will be paid. Hence no-one actually does this - they only consider themselves paid when the network verifies that the BTC are owned by their wallet.
.. having been separated last year, I've been hitting the internet dating, including Tinder.
Anyone who uses a Bitstrip as a profile photo gets rejected instantly unless they are very, very compelling otherwise. It just conveys a complete lack of honesty and originality to me..
VBScript is not quite VBA. There are some VERY annoying inconsistencies, like this : For ii = 0 To 10
' Do Stuff Next ii ' This is legal in VBA / VB6 - but it's a syntax error in VBScript!
They are not a thing - you can't sell them. You are effectively selling a service - signing a particular transaction record with a cryptographic key. If this is an illegal service, then being a notary public is probably illegal too.
It's because HR know jack about the field they are recruiting from. They therefore ask for specifics, which means that the people hiring spew out a list of the skills that the current incumbent in the target job has (or a similar job).
And it wouldn't wash with them if you just put down "Must be able to think logically, and learn new stuff quickly", which as far as I know are the only real requirements for programming jobs. They'd have to work out how to assess that, instead of counting bullet points on a CV.
Sometimes I wonder if the dearth of decent programmers that seems to be a fact of life in the current hiring environment is purely down to the HR department filtering all the decent candidates out. Our jobs go out internal to our organization first (we're the largest employer in Europe, so that's not TOO bad), so I guess all the applicants I get have been double-filtered.
And of course, there is no budget for slack. If someone capable of doing the job leaves, why, you should be able to fill his position with someone just as capable almost immediately! Workers are fungible little peons! There is no acknowledgement that you can't replace experience, much of it specific to the work.
The real solution is to have a pro-active policy of hiring inexperienced people, training them up, and promoting their loyalty, but no-one wants to do this, because the standard industry remuneration policies don't promote loyalty, so any kind of investment in people is seen as a waste because the only way that people get a decent raise is by jumping ship to another employer. It's a vicious cycle - you can't hire people to train them because you can't keep them. So the end result is that the only way you forge new capability is by destroying entire development teams and recreating them from scratch, losing man-decades of experience and productive working relationships in the process.
play 'guess what one line changed' on a 200 page document.
This is why ALL government documents (law, contracts, etc) should be kept as a relatively plain text format in a Git repo, and if any party wants to change it, it should get branched, commits should be signed, and merges should should also be signed by those who approved them.
It would be most informative to see who proposed the "kill people and make them into soylent green" filibusters to "The Happy Kittens and Gifts To Orphans Bill"
Software (and any other copyrightable work) developed directly by an employee of the US Government is, unless it qualifies to be secret, required to be released into the Public Domain, which means that you can't even attach the limited restrictions of a permissive/promiscuous license like BSD to it.
Do you have a proper keyboard with clicky mechanical switches? They provide the feedback you need to reduce your typing pressure to just over the level required.
Yeah, even worse, the scripting runtime on Windows auto-parses AA/BB/YYYY into Date types, but it defaults to USA regardless of system locale... unless it can't be interpreted as a valid date.
If you enter
12/02/1999
That's the second of December, regardless of actual system locale...
13/02/1999
And that's the 13th of February (possibly just in locales like GB).
Not sure if this has ever been fixed, but it was a royal PITA when I used to do ASP classic pages.
There are (many) people out there who have no fallback, no slack, constantly skating the line between soul-crushing poverty and homelessness. As the article puts it - sure, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you can afford bootstraps. It's easy to condemn these people for vices like smoking or drinking but really, would you be without your little vices? And would you retain your sanity for long without them?
You're a low-ID slashdotter. It's overwhelmingly likely that you are a middle aged white guy who's worked in tech most of his life. You had the luxury of a youth where you were not struggling to find enough food to eat and had the time to noodle around with computers or whatever you probably make your living at now.
I'm certainly in the same boat - I too have no real conception of what poverty is like. I remember my parents being cautious with money, and my grandfather helping out to buy my first computer, but I've only seen the shadows on the wall cast by this kind of life when dealing with patients in various clinics and hospital wards. I have some inkling of how tired they must feel, having worked 80-hour weeks as a junior doctor, but that was at a time when I was earning a solid wage and living in a rent-free apartment provided by my employer. I have some inkling of how money being tight feels, having lived through a period when I could quadruple my disposable income and afford an extra beer a week by spending £0.50 less per day on lunch, but I was still eating well and sleeping under my own roof.
Even now I know that if my cushy government job is scrapped and I'm out of work, I have enough skills and contacts and smarts to be earning a comfortable living again within a month or two, and enough savings to last until I am. I have a vast amount of "capital" built up in terms of experience and training and knowledge, and robust health nurtured by a lifetime of being able to afford to eat reasonably healthily. And if the worst comes to the worst, I have parents who own their own house and would be happy to put me up, an ex-wife who earns more than me and would probably support me (we don't get on as spouses any more, but the woman is a compassionate saint), etc, etc, etc.
If I believed in God, I'd have someone to thank every day for the vast privilege of being me.
Ranting like this at you is exactly what I needed, by the way. I've been feeling rather down and lonely since my marriage broke up, but this adds a most welcome measure of perspective. So thank you for the stimulus.
Manna is already completely possible and has been for some time - you don't need Glass, or object recognition, because the human provides the object recognition and "robot arms". You just need a wireless terminal of any kind, and these have been practical and available for at least a decade. The hard part is the software.
These systems are already Manna 1.0 - they order the worker around, the worker signals to the system that the work is being done, one difference being that they push buttons and read screens rather than listen and speak to the headset. Another difference is that the systems are not being used to instruct workers through the more complex tasks like burger preparation or the correct way to clean the restroom. The hardware is already more advanced than the Manna hardware of just an audio headset - the addition of a screen makes for a more reliable. high-bandwidth channel of information to the human component.
The only reason that Manna 2.0 systems are not in effect is that getting people to agree on a standard protocol for employee data and hiring and firing is difficult (and people don't currently see the need). It's only a matter of time before some startup decides to implement it - you're not going to get it from internal corporate projects because the middle management who run the project will quickly sink anything that could replace them. Likewise for a standard protocol for bidding on goods and services.
It's the Vime's Boots Paradox - you have to spend money to save money, but if you don't have the money you can't. It's more expensive being poor.
I got sick of buying cheap dress shoes for around the £40 mark because I'm a big guy (with small feet, so extra pressure on the soles) and walk hard, so the soles wear through in about 6 months. Even if you have them resoled, that costs around £20 depending on where you get it done. But I need a pair of smart shoes for the office.
So I finally went back to what I used to do in my youth when I was a medical student walking the wards ; bought a pair of high quality military boots from a domestic bootmaker. They're smart enough to wear to the office, much more comfortable than dress shoes, keep my feet dry regardless of the conditions, and I expect them to last me at least 5 years. They cost £130, so they're a significant outlay, but I'm going to save money by the end of the second year, and they are just all round better than dress shoes. The only disadvantage is that I can't tell when it's a wet day from the water seeping through the soles...
Yeah, when I did warehouse work, that was the worst aspect of it, and it really did mess with the balance of my mind ; the tedium (this was in the era of the tape Walkman, so it was a toss up between whether your music collection or your battery would run out in the first half of your shift) was terrible.
I ended up coping by walking around singing comedy songs and show tunes ; my co-workers thought I was nuts, and I probably was by the end of 6 weeks of it.
If I was doing it these days I'd be getting every educational book and podcast I could onto my MP3 player.
Then why have subsidy? Decrease the tax and save the money administrating the subsidies. Giving administrators jobs when they don't need to exist is dangerously close to socialism.
Oh, but the subsidy goes in the right person's pockets. Ah.
And that's pretty much a product of the car, that people don't build communities that are liveable with public transport.
Corporations love it of course, because they can centralize distribution and the cost of transport becomes an externality that their customers bear through paying for gas.
One of the sibling posters says that if our goal is to "save the planet" we are doomed to fail - and I'd probably agree. But I think we can build communities that are closer both physically and in terms of spirit - part of the problem with the 1% et al is that these people don't have any conception of how the other 99% live, because they are physically separated from them.
Yeah, but most of the soya is fed to animals. 70% of corn grown in the USA is fed to animals. For every kilo of meat you eat, 10 kilos of feedstock went into an animal.
So you could eat less meat, and devote more land to growing plants, which is the essence of carbon capture. And all those animal farts contribute to global warming as well (methane is a greenhouse gas).
Regardless of whether vegetarianism / veganism is better for animals or your health, they require less energy and produce less CO2.
Slashdot Mirror
The visuals in Hackers were completely unrealistic - but they avoided the ire of programmers, and the inevitable dating of their film, by instead mostly going for a kind of interpretive mindscape video, instead of attempting to realistically represent the process of hacking.
I like to think that someone in production design actually went out and researched what hacking looked like.. and instead decided to talk to people about what hacking FELT like.
Exactly.
There has been a long campaign to convince people that you shouldn't sell them on.
Why? Because they are virtually indestructible. There must be enough diamond jewellery out there for everyone by now....
Gobsmacked that no-one has marked this article "personofinterest".
I bet the NSA / CIA / FBI get a woody for this kind of technology.
They'd have to have the same characteristics as cash, which include some measures so that you can be sure they aren't forgeries.
Alas, this is not possible with Bitcoin. As a transaction log, the only thing a "wallet" is is a private key. A paper wallet, for example, is just a particular encoding of that key on a piece of paper. The key is all that's needed to transfer the balance to another key - ie, spend the Bitcoin.
The person who created that wallet could easily have another copy of the private key, therefore you don't have any assurance of the value of a given wallet until you have successfully transferred it's balance to another wallet that you exclusively control. You should treat all paper wallets and any other novelty means of storing wallets offline as potentially valueless - it's only the completed transaction that has value.
You can't "hand out" Bitcoins. Bitcoin is a consensus. To subvert Bitcoin, you'd have to deploy computing power in excess of all that already spent on the blockchain, which is unlikely or impossible even for the US Government.
Your scenario where there are "fake" Bitcoins in "circulation" isn't possible because it's not cash. It's a transaction log, and because it uses the participation of all the Bitcoin peers to verify that it's legitimate, it's virtually impossible to forge, unlike physical cash.
There's nothing special you'd have to do to have an international Bitcoin - it's already international, because it's based on maths, and not the threat of force as per fiat currencies backed by governments.
It's a shame it's a toy implementation that won't actually scale.
Bitcoin is not cash.
It requires you to be online to make transactions, can't make rapid transactions, isn't anonymous (or at least is much less anonymous) and isn't a physical object.
No, you can't. This ill-informed troll keeps cropping up, but it's just a total misconception about how it all works.
Bitcoin is a vast distributed transaction log. The only thing you store in that wallet is a private key. The coins are out there in the transaction log. The key just identifies the ones that you own. Only the holder of the private key can produce a transaction signed with that key, which is what is required to transfer the coins to another holder.
When you spend BTC, you create a transaction record and sign it with that key. That transaction then enters the Bitcoin network and peers verify whether it's correct or not. Whichever transaction gets consensus first wins - even if you created 100 transactions spending the same coin, only one of them will succeed.
Being dumb enough to believe that your transaction is good without this verification is equally as dumb as believing that an IOU from a random stranger you've never met before will be paid. Hence no-one actually does this - they only consider themselves paid when the network verifies that the BTC are owned by their wallet.
.. having been separated last year, I've been hitting the internet dating, including Tinder.
Anyone who uses a Bitstrip as a profile photo gets rejected instantly unless they are very, very compelling otherwise. It just conveys a complete lack of honesty and originality to me..
VBA is almost VB6.
VBScript is not quite VBA. There are some VERY annoying inconsistencies, like this :
For ii = 0 To 10
' Do Stuff
Next ii ' This is legal in VBA / VB6 - but it's a syntax error in VBScript!
And some of it's ideas in ownCloud 6 : operational transform collaborative editing available for OpenDocument in the browser.
In the UK, the Data Protection Act requires that they delete your data on request.
They are not a thing - you can't sell them. You are effectively selling a service - signing a particular transaction record with a cryptographic key. If this is an illegal service, then being a notary public is probably illegal too.
Wow, if we could save 2% of GDP, that's £40B, which is our entire education budget.
It's because HR know jack about the field they are recruiting from. They therefore ask for specifics, which means that the people hiring spew out a list of the skills that the current incumbent in the target job has (or a similar job).
And it wouldn't wash with them if you just put down "Must be able to think logically, and learn new stuff quickly", which as far as I know are the only real requirements for programming jobs. They'd have to work out how to assess that, instead of counting bullet points on a CV.
Sometimes I wonder if the dearth of decent programmers that seems to be a fact of life in the current hiring environment is purely down to the HR department filtering all the decent candidates out. Our jobs go out internal to our organization first (we're the largest employer in Europe, so that's not TOO bad), so I guess all the applicants I get have been double-filtered.
And of course, there is no budget for slack. If someone capable of doing the job leaves, why, you should be able to fill his position with someone just as capable almost immediately! Workers are fungible little peons! There is no acknowledgement that you can't replace experience, much of it specific to the work.
The real solution is to have a pro-active policy of hiring inexperienced people, training them up, and promoting their loyalty, but no-one wants to do this, because the standard industry remuneration policies don't promote loyalty, so any kind of investment in people is seen as a waste because the only way that people get a decent raise is by jumping ship to another employer. It's a vicious cycle - you can't hire people to train them because you can't keep them. So the end result is that the only way you forge new capability is by destroying entire development teams and recreating them from scratch, losing man-decades of experience and productive working relationships in the process.
play 'guess what one line changed' on a 200 page document.
This is why ALL government documents (law, contracts, etc) should be kept as a relatively plain text format in a Git repo, and if any party wants to change it, it should get branched, commits should be signed, and merges should should also be signed by those who approved them.
It would be most informative to see who proposed the "kill people and make them into soylent green" filibusters to "The Happy Kittens and Gifts To Orphans Bill"
Software (and any other copyrightable work) developed directly by an employee of the US Government is, unless it qualifies to be secret, required to be released into the Public Domain, which means that you can't even attach the limited restrictions of a permissive/promiscuous license like BSD to it.
Do you have a proper keyboard with clicky mechanical switches? They provide the feedback you need to reduce your typing pressure to just over the level required.
Yeah, even worse, the scripting runtime on Windows auto-parses AA/BB/YYYY into Date types, but it defaults to USA regardless of system locale... unless it can't be interpreted as a valid date.
If you enter
12/02/1999
That's the second of December, regardless of actual system locale...
13/02/1999
And that's the 13th of February (possibly just in locales like GB).
Not sure if this has ever been fixed, but it was a royal PITA when I used to do ASP classic pages.
Bullshit. Are the only person on earth who's not read this yet?
Why poor peoples bad decisions make perfect sense
There are (many) people out there who have no fallback, no slack, constantly skating the line between soul-crushing poverty and homelessness. As the article puts it - sure, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you can afford bootstraps. It's easy to condemn these people for vices like smoking or drinking but really, would you be without your little vices? And would you retain your sanity for long without them?
You're a low-ID slashdotter. It's overwhelmingly likely that you are a middle aged white guy who's worked in tech most of his life. You had the luxury of a youth where you were not struggling to find enough food to eat and had the time to noodle around with computers or whatever you probably make your living at now.
I'm certainly in the same boat - I too have no real conception of what poverty is like. I remember my parents being cautious with money, and my grandfather helping out to buy my first computer, but I've only seen the shadows on the wall cast by this kind of life when dealing with patients in various clinics and hospital wards. I have some inkling of how tired they must feel, having worked 80-hour weeks as a junior doctor, but that was at a time when I was earning a solid wage and living in a rent-free apartment provided by my employer. I have some inkling of how money being tight feels, having lived through a period when I could quadruple my disposable income and afford an extra beer a week by spending £0.50 less per day on lunch, but I was still eating well and sleeping under my own roof.
Even now I know that if my cushy government job is scrapped and I'm out of work, I have enough skills and contacts and smarts to be earning a comfortable living again within a month or two, and enough savings to last until I am. I have a vast amount of "capital" built up in terms of experience and training and knowledge, and robust health nurtured by a lifetime of being able to afford to eat reasonably healthily. And if the worst comes to the worst, I have parents who own their own house and would be happy to put me up, an ex-wife who earns more than me and would probably support me (we don't get on as spouses any more, but the woman is a compassionate saint), etc, etc, etc.
If I believed in God, I'd have someone to thank every day for the vast privilege of being me.
Ranting like this at you is exactly what I needed, by the way. I've been feeling rather down and lonely since my marriage broke up, but this adds a most welcome measure of perspective. So thank you for the stimulus.
Manna is already completely possible and has been for some time - you don't need Glass, or object recognition, because the human provides the object recognition and "robot arms". You just need a wireless terminal of any kind, and these have been practical and available for at least a decade. The hard part is the software.
These systems are already Manna 1.0 - they order the worker around, the worker signals to the system that the work is being done, one difference being that they push buttons and read screens rather than listen and speak to the headset. Another difference is that the systems are not being used to instruct workers through the more complex tasks like burger preparation or the correct way to clean the restroom. The hardware is already more advanced than the Manna hardware of just an audio headset - the addition of a screen makes for a more reliable. high-bandwidth channel of information to the human component.
The only reason that Manna 2.0 systems are not in effect is that getting people to agree on a standard protocol for employee data and hiring and firing is difficult (and people don't currently see the need). It's only a matter of time before some startup decides to implement it - you're not going to get it from internal corporate projects because the middle management who run the project will quickly sink anything that could replace them. Likewise for a standard protocol for bidding on goods and services.
It's the Vime's Boots Paradox - you have to spend money to save money, but if you don't have the money you can't. It's more expensive being poor.
I got sick of buying cheap dress shoes for around the £40 mark because I'm a big guy (with small feet, so extra pressure on the soles) and walk hard, so the soles wear through in about 6 months. Even if you have them resoled, that costs around £20 depending on where you get it done. But I need a pair of smart shoes for the office.
So I finally went back to what I used to do in my youth when I was a medical student walking the wards ; bought a pair of high quality military boots from a domestic bootmaker. They're smart enough to wear to the office, much more comfortable than dress shoes, keep my feet dry regardless of the conditions, and I expect them to last me at least 5 years. They cost £130, so they're a significant outlay, but I'm going to save money by the end of the second year, and they are just all round better than dress shoes. The only disadvantage is that I can't tell when it's a wet day from the water seeping through the soles...
Yeah, when I did warehouse work, that was the worst aspect of it, and it really did mess with the balance of my mind ; the tedium (this was in the era of the tape Walkman, so it was a toss up between whether your music collection or your battery would run out in the first half of your shift) was terrible.
I ended up coping by walking around singing comedy songs and show tunes ; my co-workers thought I was nuts, and I probably was by the end of 6 weeks of it.
If I was doing it these days I'd be getting every educational book and podcast I could onto my MP3 player.
Then why have subsidy? Decrease the tax and save the money administrating the subsidies. Giving administrators jobs when they don't need to exist is dangerously close to socialism.
Oh, but the subsidy goes in the right person's pockets. Ah.
And that's pretty much a product of the car, that people don't build communities that are liveable with public transport.
Corporations love it of course, because they can centralize distribution and the cost of transport becomes an externality that their customers bear through paying for gas.
One of the sibling posters says that if our goal is to "save the planet" we are doomed to fail - and I'd probably agree. But I think we can build communities that are closer both physically and in terms of spirit - part of the problem with the 1% et al is that these people don't have any conception of how the other 99% live, because they are physically separated from them.
Yeah, but most of the soya is fed to animals. 70% of corn grown in the USA is fed to animals. For every kilo of meat you eat, 10 kilos of feedstock went into an animal.
So you could eat less meat, and devote more land to growing plants, which is the essence of carbon capture. And all those animal farts contribute to global warming as well (methane is a greenhouse gas).
Regardless of whether vegetarianism / veganism is better for animals or your health, they require less energy and produce less CO2.