Of course, a scary number of Bitcoin "banks" in existence now have CSRF vulnerabilities that allow any website you visit to drain your balance. Which is not exactly an improvement.
There are more effective ways of destroying Bitcoin if you're a government-scale attacker. What's more, most of the Bitcoin supporters are libertarians of the "if your computer gets hacked and you lose all your bitcoins, it's your fault - ha ha!" kind.
Yes, and by the current difficulty, block rate, and GPU efficiency you would only need about 1.5GW of continuous power to produce a block chain longer than the legitimate chain that would form while you were making your fake chain.
That's only if you were using GPUs. FPGAs are orders of magnitude power-efficient, and it'd probably even be cost-effective to base an attack around custom-built structured ASICs which are more efficient still. Current best estimates are that you could do it for $1-2 million and a few kilowatts of power.
And all it would let you do is double-spend. You could make more bitcoins simply mining.
That assumes your goal was to make bitcoins, rather than to undermine the bitcoin infrastructure. If Bitcoin was really as dangerous to vested interests as many of its proponents claim, someone would inevitably be willing to spend the money just to see it die. If double-spending isn't enough to destroy trust in Bitcoin, you can also prevent any transactions from succeeding across the whole network with that much hash power.
Bitcoin also represents two other major breakthroughs that have been dreamed about since the Internet gained public awareness: viable microtransactions, and electronic payments sans middlemen and fees.
Not really. Due to the fundamental way Bitcoin is designed, all transactions have to be broadcast to and stored by all fully-fledged Bitcoin nodes, so it can't really scale to support microtransactions. (In fact, it's intentionally limited to a maximum of about 7 transactions per second for now to prevent the network being overloaded, less if the transactions are complex.) What's more, in order for your payment to go through it has to be accepted by one of a handful of Bitcoin mining pools, and they generally require a processing fee.
That's more backing than Bitcoin has - there isn't much you can actually purchase with it, and most of the users seem to be hoping to cash out their riches for money they can actually spend. Which is why the recent bubble went "pop"...
Their peripherals were based on pre-existing third party hardware designs for multitouch surfaces, though; the only new feature of the Fingerworks producs was the gesture set. In their peripheral designs, those gestures might've been implemented in firmware, but Apple's since moved them all to pure software.
Bitcoin seems to be a big thing in parts of the geek community - it's not just Slashdot that has a lot of references to it. (I've even kinda encountered it at a virtual club in Second Life I frequent, of all places!)
Precisely. There just isn't enough actual trade going on involving BitCoins or things you can buy with them to justify the current price; it all seems to be based around speculation.
The trouble is that it appears the attacker deliberately made it hard to follow the trail by moving their takings into newly-created accounts at a rate of about a move per minute, splitting them into numerous smaller pieces as they went. It's also likely that they've been fed through at least one bitcoin-randomization service by this point, and there's no way of telling which incoming payments to those correspond to which outgoing payments.
True, the presumably non-repressive Oregon government wasn't *requiring* her to commit suicide. But when you are denied the chance to fight for survival, I'd say the "option" of legal suicide has become a defacto requirement.
Of course, if you read the article, the reason they wouldn't cover the cancer treatment drugs is because said drugs wouldn't actually increase her chances of survival. As the article says, there's a lot of modern, "innovative" and very expensive cancer drugs that can only increase lifespan and can't actually cure it. What it doesn't mention is that the claimed lifespan extensions are tiny, the studies demonstrating them are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and generally highly questionable, and the patients' quality of life is fairly awful. The reason they're still profitable is that cancer in particular is a very emotive topic, and both patients and the press seem to support any treatment that claims to help, no matter how expensive and ineffective it is or how nasty the side-effects are.
Could somebody here please translate all this into American so the rest of us can understand it?!
For those that didn't get the GP, it's an in-joke about the odd terminology used by politicians in the UK's House of Commons. Roughly speaking, I think "right honourable gentlemen" translates to "assholes", "misinforming" is a way of saying "I think you're lying through your teeth", and "with respect" means "I have no respect for you whatsoever".
They cannot legally collude to fix prices, violation of the Antitrust act, and the feds would be all over them.
They can't legally collude. What they can legally do is watch for one of their competitors to increase prices or reduce what you get for your money, then all independently copy that move. Guess what they do?
Get it through your thick American skulls -- plenty of people will happily sacrifice some of their freedom if it means that people much worse than them won't get those freedoms, either. For example, I don't need full and absolute freedom of speech but I would like it very much if spammers and crooks were told to shut up or go to prison.
For some odd reason that doesn't seem to be how China works, though - the spammers and crooks (and worse) are in charge in many areas, and the riots the Chinese government keeps stamping out are generally a result of the rest of the population getting severly pissed off about this. In fact, that's pretty much inevitable - one of the reasons political freedom is so important is that it's the best way of stopping evil people getting into positions of power.
Well, I think TheSchwartz's name was basically Brad Fitzgerald's idea of a joke back when he worked at Livejournal. (He has a blog post about it somewhere.) No idea about the rest of them though...
It's mostly a question of how broad the standard cross-licensing agreements between phone manufacturers, I guess. I get the impression the reason this ended up in court is because they're broad enough that Apple didn't want to sign them.
Apple has hardware patents. Some relate to their computers and some are in their iOS devices. For example they acquired Fingerworks for their multi-touch patents.
As far as I'm aware, most of Apple's multi-touch patents are for the software end of multi-touch. For example, they've patented a wide variety of gestures and uses for them within applications. The actual hardware is developed and built by other companies, and presumably they're the ones that own most of the hardware patents.
The trouble with idiot-proof designs is that an even bigger idiot inevitably comes along. Sure, the engineers that have designed it might think that there's no possible way for a particular reactor design to explode, but there's always the problem of things that are so obviously dangerous that they assume no-one would be stupid enough to do them or just don't think about them at all.
That's the sensible solution. Unfortunately, most nuclear power plants are designed such that if you don't have a connection to a stable and functioning power grid, you can't safely run the generators. Daft, but it saves money, and of course there'd never be a situation where the grid fails that badly...
Feel free to find a laptop (without a crippled "home" OS) that has the same specs as a MacBook for $600 less than.
Very few people want a laptop with "the same specs as a MacBook", though - many laptop buyers are happy with less and some need more, but only a tiny number want that precise specification and set of features.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, a scary number of Bitcoin "banks" in existence now have CSRF vulnerabilities that allow any website you visit to drain your balance. Which is not exactly an improvement.
There are more effective ways of destroying Bitcoin if you're a government-scale attacker. What's more, most of the Bitcoin supporters are libertarians of the "if your computer gets hacked and you lose all your bitcoins, it's your fault - ha ha!" kind.
Yes, and by the current difficulty, block rate, and GPU efficiency you would only need about 1.5GW of continuous power to produce a block chain longer than the legitimate chain that would form while you were making your fake chain.
That's only if you were using GPUs. FPGAs are orders of magnitude power-efficient, and it'd probably even be cost-effective to base an attack around custom-built structured ASICs which are more efficient still. Current best estimates are that you could do it for $1-2 million and a few kilowatts of power.
And all it would let you do is double-spend. You could make more bitcoins simply mining.
That assumes your goal was to make bitcoins, rather than to undermine the bitcoin infrastructure. If Bitcoin was really as dangerous to vested interests as many of its proponents claim, someone would inevitably be willing to spend the money just to see it die. If double-spending isn't enough to destroy trust in Bitcoin, you can also prevent any transactions from succeeding across the whole network with that much hash power.
Bitcoin also represents two other major breakthroughs that have been dreamed about since the Internet gained public awareness: viable microtransactions, and electronic payments sans middlemen and fees.
Not really. Due to the fundamental way Bitcoin is designed, all transactions have to be broadcast to and stored by all fully-fledged Bitcoin nodes, so it can't really scale to support microtransactions. (In fact, it's intentionally limited to a maximum of about 7 transactions per second for now to prevent the network being overloaded, less if the transactions are complex.) What's more, in order for your payment to go through it has to be accepted by one of a handful of Bitcoin mining pools, and they generally require a processing fee.
Stocks have underlying intrinsic value: they represent a company with actual assets. Bitcoins don't.
That's more backing than Bitcoin has - there isn't much you can actually purchase with it, and most of the users seem to be hoping to cash out their riches for money they can actually spend. Which is why the recent bubble went "pop"...
Their peripherals were based on pre-existing third party hardware designs for multitouch surfaces, though; the only new feature of the Fingerworks producs was the gesture set. In their peripheral designs, those gestures might've been implemented in firmware, but Apple's since moved them all to pure software.
Heh. I actually suspected as much, but thought I might as well translate it for the Americans reading anyway...
Bitcoin seems to be a big thing in parts of the geek community - it's not just Slashdot that has a lot of references to it. (I've even kinda encountered it at a virtual club in Second Life I frequent, of all places!)
Precisely. There just isn't enough actual trade going on involving BitCoins or things you can buy with them to justify the current price; it all seems to be based around speculation.
To my mind, this isn't a story about "OMG BitCoins can be stolen". This is a story about "OMG someone thought BitCoins were worth stealing".
Rumour has it LulzSec may have been involved, in which case it's probably more a case of "OMG people will freak out if we steal BitCoins"
The trouble is that it appears the attacker deliberately made it hard to follow the trail by moving their takings into newly-created accounts at a rate of about a move per minute, splitting them into numerous smaller pieces as they went. It's also likely that they've been fed through at least one bitcoin-randomization service by this point, and there's no way of telling which incoming payments to those correspond to which outgoing payments.
The kind that can't quite so easily get away with screwing over 99% of the population at a whim?
True, the presumably non-repressive Oregon government wasn't *requiring* her to commit suicide. But when you are denied the chance to fight for survival, I'd say the "option" of legal suicide has become a defacto requirement.
Of course, if you read the article, the reason they wouldn't cover the cancer treatment drugs is because said drugs wouldn't actually increase her chances of survival. As the article says, there's a lot of modern, "innovative" and very expensive cancer drugs that can only increase lifespan and can't actually cure it. What it doesn't mention is that the claimed lifespan extensions are tiny, the studies demonstrating them are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and generally highly questionable, and the patients' quality of life is fairly awful. The reason they're still profitable is that cancer in particular is a very emotive topic, and both patients and the press seem to support any treatment that claims to help, no matter how expensive and ineffective it is or how nasty the side-effects are.
Could somebody here please translate all this into American so the rest of us can understand it?!
For those that didn't get the GP, it's an in-joke about the odd terminology used by politicians in the UK's House of Commons. Roughly speaking, I think "right honourable gentlemen" translates to "assholes", "misinforming" is a way of saying "I think you're lying through your teeth", and "with respect" means "I have no respect for you whatsoever".
Actually, it turns out that MicroSD cards are fractionally cheaper than bare flash chips for various reasons... not that much cheaper though.
They cannot legally collude to fix prices, violation of the Antitrust act, and the feds would be all over them.
They can't legally collude. What they can legally do is watch for one of their competitors to increase prices or reduce what you get for your money, then all independently copy that move. Guess what they do?
Get it through your thick American skulls -- plenty of people will happily sacrifice some of their freedom if it means that people much worse than them won't get those freedoms, either. For example, I don't need full and absolute freedom of speech but I would like it very much if spammers and crooks were told to shut up or go to prison.
For some odd reason that doesn't seem to be how China works, though - the spammers and crooks (and worse) are in charge in many areas, and the riots the Chinese government keeps stamping out are generally a result of the rest of the population getting severly pissed off about this. In fact, that's pretty much inevitable - one of the reasons political freedom is so important is that it's the best way of stopping evil people getting into positions of power.
Well, I think TheSchwartz's name was basically Brad Fitzgerald's idea of a joke back when he worked at Livejournal. (He has a blog post about it somewhere.) No idea about the rest of them though...
It's mostly a question of how broad the standard cross-licensing agreements between phone manufacturers, I guess. I get the impression the reason this ended up in court is because they're broad enough that Apple didn't want to sign them.
Apple has hardware patents. Some relate to their computers and some are in their iOS devices. For example they acquired Fingerworks for their multi-touch patents.
As far as I'm aware, most of Apple's multi-touch patents are for the software end of multi-touch. For example, they've patented a wide variety of gestures and uses for them within applications. The actual hardware is developed and built by other companies, and presumably they're the ones that own most of the hardware patents.
Unless the reactor can't explode.
The trouble with idiot-proof designs is that an even bigger idiot inevitably comes along. Sure, the engineers that have designed it might think that there's no possible way for a particular reactor design to explode, but there's always the problem of things that are so obviously dangerous that they assume no-one would be stupid enough to do them or just don't think about them at all.
That's the sensible solution. Unfortunately, most nuclear power plants are designed such that if you don't have a connection to a stable and functioning power grid, you can't safely run the generators. Daft, but it saves money, and of course there'd never be a situation where the grid fails that badly...
Feel free to find a laptop (without a crippled "home" OS) that has the same specs as a MacBook for $600 less than.
Very few people want a laptop with "the same specs as a MacBook", though - many laptop buyers are happy with less and some need more, but only a tiny number want that precise specification and set of features.
And I didn't see a battery on the photos.
That'll be the three cylinders covered in blue plastic taking up most of the space within the casing. At a guess, anyway.