Who put you there? Why are you and all these other people in there? Are you going to end up coming back here again? Why didn't we just shoot you the moment the judge struck the gavel? Is a prison supposed to have more functions than appeasing Daily Mail readers with petty acts of vindictiveness?
Two things: 1) The transaction ratios here are of the order of 80 to 1, and the blocks chains are becoming ever more difficult to verify. How sustainable are these ratios as time marches on?
2) There is an inherant bias in verified blocks. Right now transactions are being selected, in part, based on their attached transaction fees. However, as the Bitcoin craze dies down, or even becomes mainstream, I don't see the practice of transactions fees catching on as individuals choose freeloading over payment.
Everyone who transacts in bitcoins will have an incentive to keep the difficulty high enough such that this is unfeasible.
Almost everyone who transcts in Bitcoins is a tightwad libertarian looking to make a speculative quick buck. They will not, ever, collectively pay for transactions when they could freeload instead. The problem with Bitcoin was and will always remain how to persuade the marks/miners to keep expending computer power once the easy coins have all dried up.
This was evident to those of us 3 years ago, who casually downloaded the bitcoin client, left it run for a week or so, and saw not one coin in return. We (by which of course I mean "I") subsequently lost interest and uninstalled the client. I see nothing which can change this basic dynamic of most people not caring enough to mine/verify. Even if bitcoiners do start adding transaction fees (I regard this as a risible suggestion), the mining blocks will have everything tied up, again driving most of the mining network away.
The network was not built with a mandatory minimium transaction fee, or other mechanism to ensure the continued interest of those verifying the transactions -- those actually making the effort to keep Bitcoin running. This is the achilles heel and inevitable doom of the currency. You cannot build a currency on the collective individualism of Randroids.
* Netflix pays for their bandwidth * Customers pay for their bandwidth
Not quite. Netflix pays for their bandwidth and usage. Customers only pay for their bandwidth, not their usage.
The ISPs who promised to ship these customers unlimited volume of data at fixed costs are now blaming Netflix for actually developing a service popular enough to force them to make good on that promise. The big ISPs have written cheques their networks can't cash and are now extorting Netflix to make up the difference.
So the $80 a month I pay my ISP goes to what exactly?
Your free lunch.
The deep, deep irony --actual classical irony -- here is that Cicconi does believe in cost free delivery and free costs. We know that because that is exactly what they promise to their customers.
Netflix is not the cause of recent video traffic volumes on the web. The cause is "all you can eat" unlimited monthly usage rates which have become the industry standard. It was agreed in the 1980s that ISPs would operate on an "end user pays" model, but at some point in the 2000s, ISPs move towards an "All you can eat" model where the end user pays only for the connection, and not the volume of traffic they actually upload/download.
So when customers actually do start downloading all they can eat, where does the blame lie here? At Netflix, who have already paid cogent handsomely to upload every single byte of every single video they stream? With the customers, who paid up front for a connection which said "unlimited, all you can eat downloads", and then proceeded to do so? Or does the blame lie with the ISPs and telcos, who wrote millions of unlimited download cheques that their networks now cannot cash.
So Mr. Cicconi , If your customers are downloading too much data, charge them for the cost. If you can't do that without losing customers, then you can't compete, and its time to step aside for ISPs who can. Netflix does not enter into this equation. The internet is based on an end-user pays principle and if you AT&T want to have end users using without paying, that's your problem and nothing to do with Netflix, Youtube, the Pirate Bay, Facebook or anyone else. Don't extort others when you've bitten off more bytes than you can chew.
Pretty much. I drive a car with a manual transmission; we don't get giant brake pedals, so I'm stomping on this tiny little square which my foot can easily slip from. It has, and has found the accelerator...which is usually non-functional because I'm out of gear.
You probably shouldn't have passed your driving test because you're almost certainly not placing your feet on the pedals correctly. (What I'm about to say applied to right side driver vehicles -- UK/Ireland cars)
Positioning and use of the feet is as follows: Left foot controls the clutch and nothing but the clutch. The right foot never touches the clutch pedal. When using the clutch, the foot must lie flat on the pedal, pushing with the leg, not the toes. Remove the left foot and place on the floor when the clutch is not in use. Repeat after me : The Clutch controls the car.
Right foot controls both brake and accelerator. The left foot never controls the brake -- EVER. Now, when applying the brake the foot rests flat on the brake pedal, pushing with the leg. The heel of the foot must not touch the floor.
Finally the right foot also controls the accelerator. When doing so, the heel rests on the floor, and the accelerator is applied by pushing/leaning forward with the toes. Accelerator is un-applied by lifting the foot cleanly off the floor, pulling back the toes and covering (hovering over) the brake. If at any time the accelerator is not being applied the right foot must be covering or being applied to the brake.
When transferring between brake and accelerator and vice versa, the right foot must always be lifted back upwards slightly. Never try to shift the sideways, and never ever swivel on the heel between brake and accelerator. In an emergency braking situation, the right foot is applied to the brake with the left foot left on the floor and clutch left engaged.
Another thing to watch out for is seat adjustment. You may be too far forward or backward, too high up or down, or the seat may be leaning too far backward or forward. It's important to get your feet positioned correctly as they are your primary means of controlling the vehicle.
Absolutely. Regardless of whether the results confirm or are consistent with the theory of Inflation, the every existence of coherant structure the scale of the universe itself is an amazing result. By default, there is no reason to expect any structure whatsoever at the highest cosmic sale. (I would argue that up to now this, there was essentially no struture to the CMB)
Yet here we have "waves" of polarisation over a gigantic region of the night sky. The Universe has uniform strutures at the most enormous scales. It's a deep and awesome result that must be addressed, by inflation or whatever other theory we can propose for it.
Capitalism is whatever rehtorically useful construct I define it to be. For example, today, capitalism is a system for distracting me from my overloaded inbox to post on Slashdot. Capitalism is the oppressive system that prevents me from sleeping in on the weekends.
Bitcoin is an authetication system for bitcoin transactions-- moreover a distributed one by default. The emergence of a small number of professional mining blocks mitigates this somewhat however.
I'm not a fan of Bitcoin the currency. But the methods it uses show up just how primitive most of the default security structures of the modern internet really are. We need to base a secure web, in particular critical elements like public keys, on the kind of distributed, transpartent and openly verifiable methods used in the Bitcoin block chain. PGP keys and SSH certificates should not require trusting anyone.
The chain of trust has not been broken. There was never a chain of trust to break.
The global internet has no chain of trust or secure* encryption technologies. We have, at best, a series or half-hearted attempts which make it difficult or minor private interests to intercept communications. But we have no-way whatsoever of dealing with NSA sized, centrally managed state backed and internet wide surveillance and control.
The CA system is by now a farce, and a default means of breaking security. The Web of Trust is an only slightly more sophisticated improvement, but again is a joke compared to an actual distributed authentication method like, say, Bitcoin. Unfortunately, the latter is dominated by libertarians, swindlers, and above all a few professionalised central mining operations, so there's no solace there either. The web needs distributed, anonymous, encrypted, secure, robust, usuable and un-commandeerable communication technologies right now. The Network will be turned into a dystopian panopticon at the current rate of software development.
Whether the current generation of walled garden, App-raised programmers is up to this task remains to be seen.
*To appease the new Crypto-dogma neophytes -- reasonably secure for the digital age.
What business relationship does the Navy have with random people, and what are they doing with copies of their parking tickets?
The Navu has relationships with the ruling Ascendacy/Elite, and is amassing information on citizens in case the ruling class might ever have need of it.
It's basically lesbian romance fiction with some boring combat thrown in.
I would have described it as combat system fiction with boring "creepy-geek" romances thrown in. Either way, Bioware obviously cater to casual gaming, quasi-sexually deviant sci-fantasy reading, males. Bioware "games" are created by nerds for nerds.
If you want a game catering to a lesbian audience, play the Ocarina of Time.
We live and work in a global economy now, and trying to fight it goes against all the free market principles that this country was founded on and made us great a hundred years ago.
Ahh yes. The "Because, Markets ; Go Die!" school of philosophy. Neoliberalism (aka the I-had-fun-playing-a-hippie-when-I-dodged-the-draft-but-now-I-want-cash) thinking at its finest.
The FSB, the ISI, and Chinese intel are doing the same exact things, except that whatever they find is going to be immediately used for their country's economic advantages.
Of this I have no doubt, but where I disagree is on
a) The scale: I guess the NSA is acting on a scale of one if not two orders of magnitude higher than its counterpart agencies abroad. This no matter how you measure activity.
b) Discretion: At least if the Russians or the Chinese were monitoring us, we wouldn't be hearing about it as much as from the NSA. While it is a data collection machine, the organisation is acts in an amatuerish fashion when it comes to seeking, storing, and protecting its information and activities.
c) Whatever about the industrial reasons for Russian/Chinese espionage, the NSAs domestic programs appear to have no reason to exist other than simply to exist. Or else the NSA is actively gearing up for a cuop d'etat in the United States.
The NSA is a different beast than its counterprats or historical ancestors. We are witnessing the creation of a new, powerful, and very sinister type of human organisation.
Of course, you could also imagine a group of highly intelligent and capable programmers that grew up on legends of the Enigma, Bletchley Park, and Alan Turing... who live for reverse engineering code and breaking ciphers.
I'm sorry, but your vision of men in pursuit of a grander calling falls rather flat in the face of their actual activities of trolling in irc chatrooms and obstudely recording every phone call made inside the entire United States.
Your "Keen men" are boorish goons who would put Russian cyber-criminals to shame.
We are dealing with an extremely well funded, well staffed, and well equipped professional criminal organisation. Whatever it's actual mandate is, the NSA has taken it upon itself to be the worlds premiere cyber-crime hacking group, accountable to no state, code, man, or law, and who regard the Internet and all computers on it-- foreign or domestic-- as fair game for fraud, intrusion and seizure. The organisation is out of control; without moral compass, budgetary restraint, or regulatory oversight.
It is only a matter of time before individuals and managers within the NSA create actual links with the criminal fraternity and begin to engage in for-profit cyber-crime. Indeed, this has probably occured already.
And should the cyber-crime divisions inside the NSA ever make common cause with their criminal counterparts in the financial sector -- God help Western Civilisation. The closest parallel I can think of is the rise of the nobility-church-state alliance in the ancien regiem and the subsequent ruination of France prior to the revolution.
Not everything can be reduced to numbers, factored and condensed down to a single answer or list of probabilites. I'm a methematician and I'm here to tell you that a lot of what is presented as "mathematical" modelling in the modern world is little short of numerology and data massage.
Eventually, if you go deeply enough into these kinds of models, you will forget that there is an actual game of basketball, being played by real human players. The instant that happens, you've become a numerologist and cargo-cult scientist. My opinion is that this is occuring in an increasingly large number of "clever geeks" now equipped with powerful computers and sophormic mathematics.
If your browser is presented with a genuine signed Google.com certificate, issued by Honest Achmed's Trusty Certificates of Tehran Iran, then why shouldn't your browser just trust this certificate from a trusted CA?
Because if you don't accept, your browser will emit a shrill piercing wail, loudly declaiming your obscene and hertical attempts to use a secure connection which has not been certified. A yellow clad official -- likely of Arstotzkan origin -- will appear to lend an air of official disapproval to the disgraceful suggestion that you should prefer encryption, any encryption, over plain text without authentication.
So, you must Accept Our Glorious CA Validated HTTPS Protocols or else revert to wide open plain text. Cause no trouble.
P.S.
I personally believe that Firefox's self signed policies were the result of NSA lobbying/influence at Mozilla. The secure web was set back a decade by this decision, and the fallout has render the entire CA and hence https infrastructure all but useless.
You might think it's a good idea to kick everyone who comes up with a terrible idea out of society, but it really isn't. In fact, the type of person willing to consider such radical -- albeit ridiculous-- ideas is in fact the ideal candidate for an associate editor of an academic journal.
Feynman was a bit of a maverick; in somes ways a cultivated one. And at times -- Manhatten and the Challenger Inquiry -- a very useful one.
But as a scientists Feynman was anything but a Maverick. His work was entirely mainstream, even his most original and innovative work, as theoretical physics was at the time in a radical phase. Personally Feynman may have been somewhat goofy. Professional he was very creative. But he was not a Maverick who ever seriously went against mainstream opinon; even his objections to String Theory were muted.
The closest scientists who would qualify as Mavericks were the Quantum pioneers of the 1920s, Einstein with relativity, and possibly Micheal Faraday. You could also go back to Newton and Gelileo, but remember, for every one of these there are fifty Velikovsky's.
Slashdot Mirror
Who put you there? Why are you and all these other people in there? Are you going to end up coming back here again? Why didn't we just shoot you the moment the judge struck the gavel? Is a prison supposed to have more functions than appeasing Daily Mail readers with petty acts of vindictiveness?
Sorry the transaction ratios are of the order of 80,000 to 1. I can't see this continuing as blocks become more and more difficult to verify.
Two things:
1) The transaction ratios here are of the order of 80 to 1, and the blocks chains are becoming ever more difficult to verify. How sustainable are these ratios as time marches on?
2) There is an inherant bias in verified blocks. Right now transactions are being selected, in part, based on their attached transaction fees. However, as the Bitcoin craze dies down, or even becomes mainstream, I don't see the practice of transactions fees catching on as individuals choose freeloading over payment.
Almost everyone who transcts in Bitcoins is a tightwad libertarian looking to make a speculative quick buck. They will not, ever, collectively pay for transactions when they could freeload instead. The problem with Bitcoin was and will always remain how to persuade the marks/miners to keep expending computer power once the easy coins have all dried up.
This was evident to those of us 3 years ago, who casually downloaded the bitcoin client, left it run for a week or so, and saw not one coin in return. We (by which of course I mean "I") subsequently lost interest and uninstalled the client. I see nothing which can change this basic dynamic of most people not caring enough to mine/verify. Even if bitcoiners do start adding transaction fees (I regard this as a risible suggestion), the mining blocks will have everything tied up, again driving most of the mining network away.
The network was not built with a mandatory minimium transaction fee, or other mechanism to ensure the continued interest of those verifying the transactions -- those actually making the effort to keep Bitcoin running. This is the achilles heel and inevitable doom of the currency. You cannot build a currency on the collective individualism of Randroids.
Not quite. Netflix pays for their bandwidth and usage. Customers only pay for their bandwidth, not their usage.
The ISPs who promised to ship these customers unlimited volume of data at fixed costs are now blaming Netflix for actually developing a service popular enough to force them to make good on that promise. The big ISPs have written cheques their networks can't cash and are now extorting Netflix to make up the difference.
Your free lunch.
The deep, deep irony --actual classical irony -- here is that Cicconi does believe in cost free delivery and free costs. We know that because that is exactly what they promise to their customers.
Netflix is not the cause of recent video traffic volumes on the web. The cause is "all you can eat" unlimited monthly usage rates which have become the industry standard. It was agreed in the 1980s that ISPs would operate on an "end user pays" model, but at some point in the 2000s, ISPs move towards an "All you can eat" model where the end user pays only for the connection, and not the volume of traffic they actually upload/download.
So when customers actually do start downloading all they can eat, where does the blame lie here? At Netflix, who have already paid cogent handsomely to upload every single byte of every single video they stream? With the customers, who paid up front for a connection which said "unlimited, all you can eat downloads", and then proceeded to do so? Or does the blame lie with the ISPs and telcos, who wrote millions of unlimited download cheques that their networks now cannot cash.
So Mr. Cicconi , If your customers are downloading too much data, charge them for the cost. If you can't do that without losing customers, then you can't compete, and its time to step aside for ISPs who can. Netflix does not enter into this equation. The internet is based on an end-user pays principle and if you AT&T want to have end users using without paying, that's your problem and nothing to do with Netflix, Youtube, the Pirate Bay, Facebook or anyone else. Don't extort others when you've bitten off more bytes than you can chew.
You probably shouldn't have passed your driving test because you're almost certainly not placing your feet on the pedals correctly. (What I'm about to say applied to right side driver vehicles -- UK/Ireland cars)
Positioning and use of the feet is as follows: Left foot controls the clutch and nothing but the clutch. The right foot never touches the clutch pedal. When using the clutch, the foot must lie flat on the pedal, pushing with the leg, not the toes. Remove the left foot and place on the floor when the clutch is not in use. Repeat after me : The Clutch controls the car.
Right foot controls both brake and accelerator. The left foot never controls the brake -- EVER. Now, when applying the brake the foot rests flat on the brake pedal, pushing with the leg. The heel of the foot must not touch the floor.
Finally the right foot also controls the accelerator. When doing so, the heel rests on the floor, and the accelerator is applied by pushing/leaning forward with the toes. Accelerator is un-applied by lifting the foot cleanly off the floor, pulling back the toes and covering (hovering over) the brake. If at any time the accelerator is not being applied the right foot must be covering or being applied to the brake.
When transferring between brake and accelerator and vice versa, the right foot must always be lifted back upwards slightly. Never try to shift the sideways, and never ever swivel on the heel between brake and accelerator. In an emergency braking situation, the right foot is applied to the brake with the left foot left on the floor and clutch left engaged.
Another thing to watch out for is seat adjustment. You may be too far forward or backward, too high up or down, or the seat may be leaning too far backward or forward. It's important to get your feet positioned correctly as they are your primary means of controlling the vehicle.
Absolutely. Regardless of whether the results confirm or are consistent with the theory of Inflation, the every existence of coherant structure the scale of the universe itself is an amazing result. By default, there is no reason to expect any structure whatsoever at the highest cosmic sale. (I would argue that up to now this, there was essentially no struture to the CMB)
Yet here we have "waves" of polarisation over a gigantic region of the night sky. The Universe has uniform strutures at the most enormous scales. It's a deep and awesome result that must be addressed, by inflation or whatever other theory we can propose for it.
Capitalism is whatever rehtorically useful construct I define it to be. For example, today, capitalism is a system for distracting me from my overloaded inbox to post on Slashdot. Capitalism is the oppressive system that prevents me from sleeping in on the weekends.
What's your Capitalism today?
We're talking about a programming career here. Following fads is a major aspect of the industry.
Bitcoin is an authetication system for bitcoin transactions-- moreover a distributed one by default. The emergence of a small number of professional mining blocks mitigates this somewhat however.
I'm not a fan of Bitcoin the currency. But the methods it uses show up just how primitive most of the default security structures of the modern internet really are. We need to base a secure web, in particular critical elements like public keys, on the kind of distributed, transpartent and openly verifiable methods used in the Bitcoin block chain. PGP keys and SSH certificates should not require trusting anyone.
What about teaching them that living a life outside of school/work is important? Won't the first lesson tend to conflict with the second.
The chain of trust has not been broken. There was never a chain of trust to break.
The global internet has no chain of trust or secure* encryption technologies. We have, at best, a series or half-hearted attempts which make it difficult or minor private interests to intercept communications. But we have no-way whatsoever of dealing with NSA sized, centrally managed state backed and internet wide surveillance and control.
The CA system is by now a farce, and a default means of breaking security. The Web of Trust is an only slightly more sophisticated improvement, but again is a joke compared to an actual distributed authentication method like, say, Bitcoin. Unfortunately, the latter is dominated by libertarians, swindlers, and above all a few professionalised central mining operations, so there's no solace there either. The web needs distributed, anonymous, encrypted, secure, robust, usuable and un-commandeerable communication technologies right now. The Network will be turned into a dystopian panopticon at the current rate of software development.
Whether the current generation of walled garden, App-raised programmers is up to this task remains to be seen.
*To appease the new Crypto-dogma neophytes -- reasonably secure for the digital age.
The Navu has relationships with the ruling Ascendacy/Elite, and is amassing information on citizens in case the ruling class might ever have need of it.
No body is "in-character" during a fragging match.
I don't think that flirting with teenage vdeo gamers on the internet is very good advice.
I would have described it as combat system fiction with boring "creepy-geek" romances thrown in. Either way, Bioware obviously cater to casual gaming, quasi-sexually deviant sci-fantasy reading, males. Bioware "games" are created by nerds for nerds.
If you want a game catering to a lesbian audience, play the Ocarina of Time.
Ahh yes. The "Because, Markets ; Go Die!" school of philosophy. Neoliberalism (aka the I-had-fun-playing-a-hippie-when-I-dodged-the-draft-but-now-I-want-cash) thinking at its finest.
Of this I have no doubt, but where I disagree is on
a) The scale: I guess the NSA is acting on a scale of one if not two orders of magnitude higher than its counterpart agencies abroad. This no matter how you measure activity.
b) Discretion: At least if the Russians or the Chinese were monitoring us, we wouldn't be hearing about it as much as from the NSA. While it is a data collection machine, the organisation is acts in an amatuerish fashion when it comes to seeking, storing, and protecting its information and activities.
c) Whatever about the industrial reasons for Russian/Chinese espionage, the NSAs domestic programs appear to have no reason to exist other than simply to exist. Or else the NSA is actively gearing up for a cuop d'etat in the United States.
The NSA is a different beast than its counterprats or historical ancestors. We are witnessing the creation of a new, powerful, and very sinister type of human organisation.
I'm sorry, but your vision of men in pursuit of a grander calling falls rather flat in the face of their actual activities of trolling in irc chatrooms and obstudely recording every phone call made inside the entire United States.
Your "Keen men" are boorish goons who would put Russian cyber-criminals to shame.
We are dealing with an extremely well funded, well staffed, and well equipped professional criminal organisation. Whatever it's actual mandate is, the NSA has taken it upon itself to be the worlds premiere cyber-crime hacking group, accountable to no state, code, man, or law, and who regard the Internet and all computers on it-- foreign or domestic-- as fair game for fraud, intrusion and seizure. The organisation is out of control; without moral compass, budgetary restraint, or regulatory oversight.
It is only a matter of time before individuals and managers within the NSA create actual links with the criminal fraternity and begin to engage in for-profit cyber-crime. Indeed, this has probably occured already.
And should the cyber-crime divisions inside the NSA ever make common cause with their criminal counterparts in the financial sector -- God help Western Civilisation. The closest parallel I can think of is the rise of the nobility-church-state alliance in the ancien regiem and the subsequent ruination of France prior to the revolution.
Not everything can be reduced to numbers, factored and condensed down to a single answer or list of probabilites. I'm a methematician and I'm here to tell you that a lot of what is presented as "mathematical" modelling in the modern world is little short of numerology and data massage.
Eventually, if you go deeply enough into these kinds of models, you will forget that there is an actual game of basketball, being played by real human players. The instant that happens, you've become a numerologist and cargo-cult scientist. My opinion is that this is occuring in an increasingly large number of "clever geeks" now equipped with powerful computers and sophormic mathematics.
Because if you don't accept, your browser will emit a shrill piercing wail, loudly declaiming your obscene and hertical attempts to use a secure connection which has not been certified. A yellow clad official -- likely of Arstotzkan origin -- will appear to lend an air of official disapproval to the disgraceful suggestion that you should prefer encryption, any encryption, over plain text without authentication.
So, you must Accept Our Glorious CA Validated HTTPS Protocols or else revert to wide open plain text. Cause no trouble.
P.S.
I personally believe that Firefox's self signed policies were the result of NSA lobbying/influence at Mozilla. The secure web was set back a decade by this decision, and the fallout has render the entire CA and hence https infrastructure all but useless.
You might think it's a good idea to kick everyone who comes up with a terrible idea out of society, but it really isn't. In fact, the type of person willing to consider such radical -- albeit ridiculous-- ideas is in fact the ideal candidate for an associate editor of an academic journal.
Feynman was a bit of a maverick; in somes ways a cultivated one. And at times -- Manhatten and the Challenger Inquiry -- a very useful one.
But as a scientists Feynman was anything but a Maverick. His work was entirely mainstream, even his most original and innovative work, as theoretical physics was at the time in a radical phase. Personally Feynman may have been somewhat goofy. Professional he was very creative. But he was not a Maverick who ever seriously went against mainstream opinon; even his objections to String Theory were muted.
The closest scientists who would qualify as Mavericks were the Quantum pioneers of the 1920s, Einstein with relativity, and possibly Micheal Faraday. You could also go back to Newton and Gelileo, but remember, for every one of these there are fifty Velikovsky's.