That's what the police originally - and sensationally - claimed. Of course, it turns out that not only was the vast majority of Landslide Productions' business in legal pornography, but even then a lot of the payments to them were fraudulent and carried out by scammers who were funneling money from stolen credit card details through fake porn sites that used Landslide Productions as their payment provider. The police then went and withheld the evidence of credit card fraud to make their cases stronger...
Exactly. A big part of the reason why people think Bitcoin is going to fail is that most of the organisations and businesses around it are shady and untrustworthy, so putting money into one of those businesses makes no sense.
If you invent an inexpensive piece of hardware that can push several orders of magnitude more SHA256 hashes per joule, you will successfully capture a disproportionate percentage of those 300 coins per hour. You do not get to generate unlimited coins - you just asymptotically approach 300/hour.
On the other hand, if you can push significantly more SHA256 hashes than the rest of the Bitcoin network you can rewrite history in a way that lets you spend the same Bitcoins multiple times. (There's also a subtle security flaw in some versions of the Bitcoin software that allow you to spend other people's Bitcoins if you can do this. This should be impossible due to the ECDSA signatures in transactions, but for speed reasons the software doesn't actually bother to check them under certain circumstances.)
Basically, if I want to send you money and I turn $10 in to bit coins right now and e-mail them to you, and you within an hour turn it back into USD, there's a very good chance you get a full $10.
Not really. There's a fairly large fee for getting the $10 into an exchange, then the exchanges charge fees of about 1%, then the recipient has to pay another fee to the exchange to change the bitcoins back into dollars, and finally pay yet another fee to withdraw them.
The general reckoning is that the biggest theft from online bitcoin "banks" was the work of the owner, who did a runner shortly thereafter, so that doesn't actuallly help much.
Newspapers still make similar mistakes. For example, here in the UK there was a big deal over the conviction for murder and subsequent appeal of a student called Amanda Knox. She was eventually acquitted but one of our tabloids accidentally hit the wrong button ran a story claiming her appeal had failed - complete with descriptions of her family members' reactions and quotes from them and her lawyer!
At least one recreational drug (Mephedrone) was actually banned in the UK as a result of a similar incident, probably more. Their reporting also managed to get something else wrong too - they claimed it was known as "meow meow", but apparently this originated in a hoax Wikipedia edit.
I used to use prgmr in its previous (first?) incarnation a few years ago and it just worked. Unusual management system though; instead of having a web-based control panel you gave them a SSH public key when you signed up and it allowed you to SSH in and get a management menu. (Apparently they've since added a way to boot up your VPS from a rescue image too.) Was a shame they closed down back then.
If you try to start riots, then yes you're going to get problems.
If you try and peacefully petition the Government for redress, you're going to get in trouble too. The whole reason there are so many riots in the first place is that China is horribly corrupt, it has a massive income disparity between rural and urban areas, because of the corruption rural dwellers can have their land taken from them at any time with essentially no compensation, and if you try to peacefully complain about any of this you're going to jail.
Even if this is true all you need to do - and indeed, this is what they seem to have done - is to convince the NRC that the safety measures aren't needed in the first place. Most of the NRC staff are ex-nuclear industry and they're quite cozy with the companies in the industry, so this isn't a huge obstacle. Also, Wikipedia seems to disagree with you:
A 1986 Congressional report found that NRC staff had provided valuable technical assistance to the utility seeking an operating license for the controversial Seabrook plant. In the late 1980s, the NRC 'created a policy' of non-enforcement by asserting its discretion not to enforcement with license conditions; between September 1989 and 1994, the 'NRC has either waived or chosen not to enforce regulations at nuclear power reactors over 340 times'.
It's probably more accurate to say that when NVidia break something it doesn't make Phoronix or get negative attention in the same way as when AMD do. For example, part of the reason I switched to ATI cards in the first place was because on several occasions NVidia managed to break their driver so that it caused system lockups on dual-core systems with the card I was using and then dragged their feet on fixing it. The final straw was their buggy rendering acceleration that made KDE 4 unusable - it took so long for them to fix it that I basically gave up and switched to the open source Nouveau driver before eventually buying an ATI card.
They suck about the same amount as NVidia's Linux drivers in my experience, though it's compensated for slightly by software developers being more willing to work around NVidia driver bugs than AMD ones.
feel the government need to give them some tough love to get them off their butts and work for themselves
This is being far too kind for them. They feel that the only reason that someone could be unemployed in the current economic climate is because they deserve to be - despite 10% unemployment or even higher in some areas, despite even minimum-wage jobs at McDonalds having dozens of applicants for each position, despite all the copious evidence that the work just isn't there.
What's more, the reason they're so keen on this idea is not because they have a reasonable belief that it's true but because it justifies cutting taxes and spending in ways that benefit their wealthy friends and screw the poor. After all, so their reasoning goes, the only reason the poor aren't as wealthy as their rich friends is because they're lazy and don't deserve to be - never mind the fact that America has some of the worst class mobility in the world and that pretty much the only reason the rich are so much better off is because their parents were too, or just how much harder the poor have to work.
The Israeli government is systematically stripping non-Jewish residents of Jerusalem of their residence and forcing them from their homes as a method of making it Jewish. It's a fairly slow process, but it's inexorable and has been going on for decades. If that doesn't count as ethnic cleansing, the systematic, planned and violent forcing out of non-Jewish Palestinians from their villages during the formation of Israel, with the odd massacre to encourage the rest, followed by the demolition of those villages and the creation of new Jewish settlements with new names certainly did. (Yes, they literally wiped the Arab population off the map. Also, I really do mean Jewish here and not just Israeli; they were and are places where only Jews were allowed to live.)
Currently I believe the ethnic cleansing is at its most obvious in the capital city of Jerusalem with a little in the West Bank, but historically speaking the entire country was founded on systematic ethnic cleansing and some members of the Knesset would quite like to see it make a more widespread return.
There is nothing I would rather wish for than the end of the occupation of the west bank, especially as a reserve soldier, but if it was so simple it would have been over a long time ago.
The simple fact of the matter is that Israeli governments since it began wanted it to continue and have systematically made sure it won't be by building increasing numbers of Jewish settlements deeper and deeper into the West Bank, slicing it up like swiss cheese and making any kind of end to the occupation less and less practical.
There is no such thing as an evil nation, that's just racist.
Why yes, Israel is just racist at pretty much every level.
All of these things are entirely open and unencumbered, and free for use by anyone.
I've heard that NaCl actually contains code under a license that forbids redistribution, and it wouldn't surprise me; Google don't seem to care much about getting licensing right. A re-implementation is probably not practical either because it's so complex and dependent on the details of Google's implementation. Mozilla are actually trying to implement SPDY but the spec seems to be basically "what Google does" right now with the formal specification changing rapidly. The only solution to implementing Dart seems to be ripping out your existing JavaScript VM and replacing it with Google's which is just not practical for any browser that doesn't already use Google's VM, so no-one else is going to implement that either.
Individuals who have lost infants within 24-48 hours of subjecting them to vaccinations find their children are not counted in the statistics. Dismissed as SIDS (unknown diagnosis).
Well, yes. There was actually one incident here in the UK where a 14 year old girl died after being given the cervical cancer vaccine. The newspapers kicked up a huge fuss about this. Turns out she had a previously-undiagnosed cancer that had been spreading throughout her body for months.
There's always going to be some kids that die soon after being vaccinated just by chance. What matters is whether more die than expected; it makes no sense to attribute deaths to vaccination just because by chance they happened at around the same time.
In the real world, the better-conducted the studies are the less effective circumcision seems to be, to the point where the claimed effect in the controlled studies was really impressively small. Said studies were also fairly badly conducted - for example, they observed both groups over a relatively short period, and for a fairly large chunk of that the group who'd had part of their penis chopped off were forbidden from having sex. (Not that they'd probably want to anyway.) They also terminated the study early and circumcised everyone in it which is known to cause benefits to be detected that don't actually exist. What's more, they somehow concluded that a decrease in the rate of HIV infection after the main part of the study was over when they had no control group anymore was due to the circumcision (rather than, say, the participants settling down into stable relationships) and actually extrapolated this decrease out into the future!
Because in the UK they have LAWS that are enforced by professional stewards of the public good... and that makes for a crappy business environment where people actually have rights and pay taxes and expect decent treatment etc etc.
Don't worry, I'm sure our current government will do away with all that soon enough.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what the police originally - and sensationally - claimed. Of course, it turns out that not only was the vast majority of Landslide Productions' business in legal pornography, but even then a lot of the payments to them were fraudulent and carried out by scammers who were funneling money from stolen credit card details through fake porn sites that used Landslide Productions as their payment provider. The police then went and withheld the evidence of credit card fraud to make their cases stronger...
Aha, that makes sense!
Exactly. A big part of the reason why people think Bitcoin is going to fail is that most of the organisations and businesses around it are shady and untrustworthy, so putting money into one of those businesses makes no sense.
If you invent an inexpensive piece of hardware that can push several orders of magnitude more SHA256 hashes per joule, you will successfully capture a disproportionate percentage of those 300 coins per hour. You do not get to generate unlimited coins - you just asymptotically approach 300/hour.
On the other hand, if you can push significantly more SHA256 hashes than the rest of the Bitcoin network you can rewrite history in a way that lets you spend the same Bitcoins multiple times. (There's also a subtle security flaw in some versions of the Bitcoin software that allow you to spend other people's Bitcoins if you can do this. This should be impossible due to the ECDSA signatures in transactions, but for speed reasons the software doesn't actually bother to check them under certain circumstances.)
Basically, if I want to send you money and I turn $10 in to bit coins right now and e-mail them to you, and you within an hour turn it back into USD, there's a very good chance you get a full $10.
Not really. There's a fairly large fee for getting the $10 into an exchange, then the exchanges charge fees of about 1%, then the recipient has to pay another fee to the exchange to change the bitcoins back into dollars, and finally pay yet another fee to withdraw them.
Their account is credited immediately
I hope you mean "within an hour or so". Otherwise someone's probably robbing your site with fake transactions already...
The general reckoning is that the biggest theft from online bitcoin "banks" was the work of the owner, who did a runner shortly thereafter, so that doesn't actuallly help much.
Newspapers still make similar mistakes. For example, here in the UK there was a big deal over the conviction for murder and subsequent appeal of a student called Amanda Knox. She was eventually acquitted but one of our tabloids accidentally hit the wrong button ran a story claiming her appeal had failed - complete with descriptions of her family members' reactions and quotes from them and her lawyer!
That'd be a breach of the First Amendment, and news organisations in the US are in fact quite happy to fight for the right to lie.
At least one recreational drug (Mephedrone) was actually banned in the UK as a result of a similar incident, probably more. Their reporting also managed to get something else wrong too - they claimed it was known as "meow meow", but apparently this originated in a hoax Wikipedia edit.
It's not hard to find examples of Fox News dishonesty - for example, take this graph that's been carefully distorted to make it look like unemployment increased when it actually decreased as a way of attacking Obama - but the individual examples are beside the point. The problem is the pattern of behaviour they show.
I used to use prgmr in its previous (first?) incarnation a few years ago and it just worked. Unusual management system though; instead of having a web-based control panel you gave them a SSH public key when you signed up and it allowed you to SSH in and get a management menu. (Apparently they've since added a way to boot up your VPS from a rescue image too.) Was a shame they closed down back then.
If you try to start riots, then yes you're going to get problems.
If you try and peacefully petition the Government for redress, you're going to get in trouble too. The whole reason there are so many riots in the first place is that China is horribly corrupt, it has a massive income disparity between rural and urban areas, because of the corruption rural dwellers can have their land taken from them at any time with essentially no compensation, and if you try to peacefully complain about any of this you're going to jail.
Even if this is true all you need to do - and indeed, this is what they seem to have done - is to convince the NRC that the safety measures aren't needed in the first place. Most of the NRC staff are ex-nuclear industry and they're quite cozy with the companies in the industry, so this isn't a huge obstacle. Also, Wikipedia seems to disagree with you:
A 1986 Congressional report found that NRC staff had provided valuable technical assistance to the utility seeking an operating license for the controversial Seabrook plant. In the late 1980s, the NRC 'created a policy' of non-enforcement by asserting its discretion not to enforcement with license conditions; between September 1989 and 1994, the 'NRC has either waived or chosen not to enforce regulations at nuclear power reactors over 340 times'.
I doubt it was intended to teach "dealing with buggy proprietary graphics drivers that only support certain kernel versions" either...
It's probably more accurate to say that when NVidia break something it doesn't make Phoronix or get negative attention in the same way as when AMD do. For example, part of the reason I switched to ATI cards in the first place was because on several occasions NVidia managed to break their driver so that it caused system lockups on dual-core systems with the card I was using and then dragged their feet on fixing it. The final straw was their buggy rendering acceleration that made KDE 4 unusable - it took so long for them to fix it that I basically gave up and switched to the open source Nouveau driver before eventually buying an ATI card.
They suck about the same amount as NVidia's Linux drivers in my experience, though it's compensated for slightly by software developers being more willing to work around NVidia driver bugs than AMD ones.
feel the government need to give them some tough love to get them off their butts and work for themselves
This is being far too kind for them. They feel that the only reason that someone could be unemployed in the current economic climate is because they deserve to be - despite 10% unemployment or even higher in some areas, despite even minimum-wage jobs at McDonalds having dozens of applicants for each position, despite all the copious evidence that the work just isn't there.
What's more, the reason they're so keen on this idea is not because they have a reasonable belief that it's true but because it justifies cutting taxes and spending in ways that benefit their wealthy friends and screw the poor. After all, so their reasoning goes, the only reason the poor aren't as wealthy as their rich friends is because they're lazy and don't deserve to be - never mind the fact that America has some of the worst class mobility in the world and that pretty much the only reason the rich are so much better off is because their parents were too, or just how much harder the poor have to work.
The Israeli government is systematically stripping non-Jewish residents of Jerusalem of their residence and forcing them from their homes as a method of making it Jewish. It's a fairly slow process, but it's inexorable and has been going on for decades. If that doesn't count as ethnic cleansing, the systematic, planned and violent forcing out of non-Jewish Palestinians from their villages during the formation of Israel, with the odd massacre to encourage the rest, followed by the demolition of those villages and the creation of new Jewish settlements with new names certainly did. (Yes, they literally wiped the Arab population off the map. Also, I really do mean Jewish here and not just Israeli; they were and are places where only Jews were allowed to live.)
Currently I believe the ethnic cleansing is at its most obvious in the capital city of Jerusalem with a little in the West Bank, but historically speaking the entire country was founded on systematic ethnic cleansing and some members of the Knesset would quite like to see it make a more widespread return.
There is nothing I would rather wish for than the end of the occupation of the west bank, especially as a reserve soldier, but if it was so simple it would have been over a long time ago.
The simple fact of the matter is that Israeli governments since it began wanted it to continue and have systematically made sure it won't be by building increasing numbers of Jewish settlements deeper and deeper into the West Bank, slicing it up like swiss cheese and making any kind of end to the occupation less and less practical.
There is no such thing as an evil nation, that's just racist.
Why yes, Israel is just racist at pretty much every level.
Except that Intel doesn't want to improve netbook-type devices because that would cut into their sales of more profitable x86 chips.
All of these things are entirely open and unencumbered, and free for use by anyone.
I've heard that NaCl actually contains code under a license that forbids redistribution, and it wouldn't surprise me; Google don't seem to care much about getting licensing right. A re-implementation is probably not practical either because it's so complex and dependent on the details of Google's implementation. Mozilla are actually trying to implement SPDY but the spec seems to be basically "what Google does" right now with the formal specification changing rapidly. The only solution to implementing Dart seems to be ripping out your existing JavaScript VM and replacing it with Google's which is just not practical for any browser that doesn't already use Google's VM, so no-one else is going to implement that either.
Individuals who have lost infants within 24-48 hours of subjecting them to vaccinations find their children are not counted in the statistics. Dismissed as SIDS (unknown diagnosis).
Well, yes. There was actually one incident here in the UK where a 14 year old girl died after being given the cervical cancer vaccine. The newspapers kicked up a huge fuss about this. Turns out she had a previously-undiagnosed cancer that had been spreading throughout her body for months.
There's always going to be some kids that die soon after being vaccinated just by chance. What matters is whether more die than expected; it makes no sense to attribute deaths to vaccination just because by chance they happened at around the same time.
In the real world, the better-conducted the studies are the less effective circumcision seems to be, to the point where the claimed effect in the controlled studies was really impressively small. Said studies were also fairly badly conducted - for example, they observed both groups over a relatively short period, and for a fairly large chunk of that the group who'd had part of their penis chopped off were forbidden from having sex. (Not that they'd probably want to anyway.) They also terminated the study early and circumcised everyone in it which is known to cause benefits to be detected that don't actually exist. What's more, they somehow concluded that a decrease in the rate of HIV infection after the main part of the study was over when they had no control group anymore was due to the circumcision (rather than, say, the participants settling down into stable relationships) and actually extrapolated this decrease out into the future!
Because in the UK they have LAWS that are enforced by professional stewards of the public good... and that makes for a crappy business environment where people actually have rights and pay taxes and expect decent treatment etc etc.
Don't worry, I'm sure our current government will do away with all that soon enough.