Or assuming there are no non-lab specimens. I do not consider it out of the range of possibility that someone excavating, say, a WW1 battlefield, could find the preserved corpse of someone who was infected with smallpox (We got samples of the Spanish flu virus that way) and thus put the virus back in the wild.
Hesitant? They're explicitly prohibited from issuing advisory opinions via the case or controversy clause. I personally think that is a dumb idea, as reference questions are a useful thing, as congresspersons/senators/MPs/etc. are generally not constitutional experts, nor in my opinion should that be a requirement of the job (they should have a working knowledge of constitutional law with the powers and restrictions thereof, but we have judges to provide specific expertise on that).
The issue is that states want Amazon to collect taxes where they don't have a physical presence (Amazon plays a bit loose with the definition of a "presence" and basically has said to states "we don't have a presence in your state, so don't require us to collect tax or we'll remove our presence from your state"), as opposed to requiring the customer to do their own tax work on it (which no one bothers with).
This case, the states aren't allowed to require that, as the authority to regulate interstate commerce lies with congress. But if congress passes a law delegating this authority to the states, then they can require Amazon to collect the tax.
But Amazon is whining because that would cost them money to keep track of the tax rates and specifications (e.g. tax exceptions or different rates on some types of items like food or clothing), for each city, county, and state.
The rules can certainly change if the majority of the network agrees to it. It happens occasionally when the software is updated significantly.
For example, a rule that recently existed was no transactions smaller than 0.01BTC were allowed (This was to prevent annoying people from spamming the network with tons of tiny transactions and disrupting things). Miners wouldn't process them into a block and thus the transaction wouldn't go through. That was removed in the most recent version and now that most of the network has updated, you can now do transactions as small as 0.00000001 BTC (Theoretically anyway. Tiny transactions (0.01BTC) incur a 0.01 BTC fee, which is likely to be reduced/removed in the near future, probably next version, as 0.01BTC is about $0.08 and a bit too large a base unit for most people, barring those who are used to Swedish rounding).
If a change was controversial and only part of the network upgraded, then yes, that would result in a currency fork.
They are traceable within the system, but not to an actual person.
That's flat wrong since it uses unique keys for signatures. If you can get a person's signature, which you can, you can show they had it. Repeat and you have the whole chain.
What do you mean "person's signature"? There is no one signature for a person. Keypairs and thus their addresses (a bitcoin address is a human-readable (base 58 encoding) representation of the hash of the public half of a keypair) are generated as needed like a UUID. Any given person could have any number of addresses and there is no way within the system to tell what physical person that address belongs to. I could easily generate dozens of addresses and shuffle bitcoins between them all day and it is not possible from looking at the blockchain to know out that I'm just sending coins to myself.
Keypairs are not associated with a particular person like the usual usage of public key encryption (pgp, executable signing, etc.), where you have your public key hosted on a well known keyserver and have your name and information attached (though one of the popular trading systems for bitcoins (bitcoin-otc) uses gpg signatures to identify/authenticate users and organize its rating and web-of-trust system), it's not required to use bitcoins).
For example, address 16kfodhAckE8FZQpNcDwzG3tDGxypGTdwm. Who is behind it? You can see the transactions there, but is it mine? Is one of the addresses that sent coins to it mine? Which one? None of that information can be found from the blockchain.
Being as that address has been publicly advertized (it's used for accepting donations) by its owner (ufasoft, who made one of the popular CPU-based mining programs), we know at least the online identity of the owner. But we have no idea what other addresses he owns. For all we know (actually, I know at least one of them is a real donation, as I sent it, but all the other ones are mysteries), all the transactions there are him "donating" to himself.
They are traceable within the system, but not to an actual person. You see bitcoins being transferred between addresses, but there's no way to link those addresses to actual people. It's like watching transactions between numbered bank accounts. There's no way to tell who those accounts belong to just from that information.
It is possible to figure out address ownership from outside if you controlled a considerable fraction of the network (so you could link addresses to IP addresses, though this is potentially defeatible via proxies or onion routing or similar) and/or that currency is transferred out of the system (converted to US dollars or some other currency via an exchange) via a means you can monitor.
1. Coin ownership is determined by possession of the private key for that bitcoin address. If you don't have that private key, you can't sign a transaction using those coins, and thus can't spend them.
2. Because when you transfer coins, you announce that to everyone you are connected to, and they send it on to everyone they are connected to, etc. If you send out two transactions involving the same coins, everyone will be able to see that (you can determine the value held by each address by tracing through the blockchain and adding up all the transactions involving that address) and know there are no longer any bitcoins at that/those address(es). One of the transactions will go through (the first transaction to be received by the majority of the network. Which one that is depends on network latency, etc.), and the other ones will be rejected as the inputs (the addresses coins are being removed from) will be invalid (they won't contain the amount of coins you say they do).
3. Your wallet doesn't contain coins. It contains the public-private keypairs for each address you own, each of which has some amount of currency associated with it. You can think of it like a bunch of keys to safe deposit boxes, each of which contains some amount of currency. You spend that currency by giving the key(s) to that box(es) to someone else and thus transferring the currency within to a box owned by them. If the amount in the box(es) isn't equal to the amount you wanted to send, you will get a new box and the key for it that contains the remainder. Duplicating the keys would not duplicate the box itself.
1. The blocks aren't worth 50 bitcoins, that's a subsidy for finding the block, which serves to introduce and distribute the currency over time.
2. It's 2016 blocks, not 2048 when a difficulty change occurs.
3. It's not half the remaining blocks (the block chain will keep growing forever. generating blocks is what makes the currency run, as you explained). this occurs every 210,000 blocks and should occur for the first time sometime between mid 2012 to early 2013..
4. The block chain doesn't need to be kept in RAM, it just needs to be stored (i.e. on a hard drive).
5. The minimum transaction and minimum fee are a temporary measure to prevent transaction spamming (sending tons of tiny transactions to slow the network) and is likely to be adjusted in the near future due to the increase in value.
6. Again, the 1MB/block limit is a temporary measure to keep the blockchain from growing too fast. Currently, no block is getting close to that, with most blocks ranging in the tens of kilobytes.
7. Difficulty manipulation is a definite potential problem. In principle, this is solvable by making the network large enough that such an attack is infeasible.
8. SHA-256 being broken is another potential problem, though theoretically, it would be possible to switch to a new hash algorithm (e.g. SHA-3) on the fly in the middle of the chain as long as the majority of the network agrees on it.
Were Michael and Terri Schiavo famous prior to the massive amount of bullshit (Protests around the hospital, death threats to both the husband and relatives, etc.) surrounding that incident? I sure as fuck wouldn't need that around me at a time like this.
354 ml is every bit as much a 'measure' of what's in the bottle as 16 fl. oz. is.
There are two measurements on every box, can, and bottle: metric and US
And which of those measurements is a number you can do math on (e.g. 591ml bottle, 460kJ per 250ml, how many kJ per bottle?) without a calculator/pen&paper? Granted, this is marketing manipulation, but unit games are what facilitates it.
Since at least the 70s, everyone has been taught the metric system in school.
To a questionable degree of completeness, judging by the number of people I talk to who can't grok that watt-seconds=joules and insist on assemblages like x per second per watt.
I've heard FTTH (Fibre To The Home) or FTTP (...Premises).
AT&T's uverse currently uses FTTN or Fibre To The Node (fibre to the DSLAM, then copper from there), which is a useful compromise/stop gap if you use VDSL2 and keep the loop lengths short (<1km).
Printed in metric perhaps, but definitely not measured in metric, barring litre and two litre bottles. Unless there's some other good reason to use non-round numbers, like 355ml, other than the fact it lines up with a round imperial measurement, like 12 fluid ounces. Or 591ml bottles, which is 20 ounces. Or 710ml, which is 24 ounces.
I really rather doubt trains are ever going to be obsolete, barring us figuring out cheap teleportation. There's simply no better method of moving stuff en masse across land.
Assuming you knew the password was exactly 12 characters. There are lots more (about 2*10^22) passwords up to 12 characters long. If you set Jaguar to the task, you should have it done in two or three decades. Or maybe a month if you had the entire TOP500 at your disposal.
Although the NSA can also brute-force any 128-bit key in a few months
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Go back to math class and retake that part about exponents. 2^128 is a damn big number of keys. If you put the entire TOP500 to the task of brute forcing a 128-bit key, you might have it done in time to watch the last white dwarf in the universe go cold.
The combined Rpeak of the top 10 supercomputers is about 19 teraFLOPS, let's assume that equals to about 40 trillion integer operations per second.
Let's use 128-bit AES, so there's 2^128 possible keys.
just to increment through all those keys, never mind checking them, would require those systems for 269,000,000,000,000,000 years. While you'd probably find the right key in about half that time, it will still be long after the last stars go cold and dark.
Each bit you add to the key length doubles the keyspace. 56-bit DES is trivial to crack with specialized hardware, 128-bit is all but impossible. And never mind 256-bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Or assuming there are no non-lab specimens. I do not consider it out of the range of possibility that someone excavating, say, a WW1 battlefield, could find the preserved corpse of someone who was infected with smallpox (We got samples of the Spanish flu virus that way) and thus put the virus back in the wild.
This is nowhere near precise enough. This printer will do down to 50 micrometre. Corrective optical lenses have tolerances at or below 1 micrometre.
Hesitant? They're explicitly prohibited from issuing advisory opinions via the case or controversy clause. I personally think that is a dumb idea, as reference questions are a useful thing, as congresspersons/senators/MPs/etc. are generally not constitutional experts, nor in my opinion should that be a requirement of the job (they should have a working knowledge of constitutional law with the powers and restrictions thereof, but we have judges to provide specific expertise on that).
The issue is that states want Amazon to collect taxes where they don't have a physical presence (Amazon plays a bit loose with the definition of a "presence" and basically has said to states "we don't have a presence in your state, so don't require us to collect tax or we'll remove our presence from your state"), as opposed to requiring the customer to do their own tax work on it (which no one bothers with).
This case, the states aren't allowed to require that, as the authority to regulate interstate commerce lies with congress. But if congress passes a law delegating this authority to the states, then they can require Amazon to collect the tax.
But Amazon is whining because that would cost them money to keep track of the tax rates and specifications (e.g. tax exceptions or different rates on some types of items like food or clothing), for each city, county, and state.
Which is no longer a problem as of two weeks ago, though the "solution" is likely to cause other less temporary problems over the next four years.
We must punish these freeloading thieves! They're stealing our bandwidth!
Chariot did have gold and silver bars/coins on sale for BTC, though they're currently sold out.
The rules can certainly change if the majority of the network agrees to it. It happens occasionally when the software is updated significantly.
For example, a rule that recently existed was no transactions smaller than 0.01BTC were allowed (This was to prevent annoying people from spamming the network with tons of tiny transactions and disrupting things). Miners wouldn't process them into a block and thus the transaction wouldn't go through. That was removed in the most recent version and now that most of the network has updated, you can now do transactions as small as 0.00000001 BTC (Theoretically anyway. Tiny transactions (0.01BTC) incur a 0.01 BTC fee, which is likely to be reduced/removed in the near future, probably next version, as 0.01BTC is about $0.08 and a bit too large a base unit for most people, barring those who are used to Swedish rounding).
If a change was controversial and only part of the network upgraded, then yes, that would result in a currency fork.
They are traceable within the system, but not to an actual person.
That's flat wrong since it uses unique keys for signatures. If you can get a person's signature, which you can, you can show they had it. Repeat and you have the whole chain.
What do you mean "person's signature"? There is no one signature for a person. Keypairs and thus their addresses (a bitcoin address is a human-readable (base 58 encoding) representation of the hash of the public half of a keypair) are generated as needed like a UUID. Any given person could have any number of addresses and there is no way within the system to tell what physical person that address belongs to. I could easily generate dozens of addresses and shuffle bitcoins between them all day and it is not possible from looking at the blockchain to know out that I'm just sending coins to myself.
Keypairs are not associated with a particular person like the usual usage of public key encryption (pgp, executable signing, etc.), where you have your public key hosted on a well known keyserver and have your name and information attached (though one of the popular trading systems for bitcoins (bitcoin-otc) uses gpg signatures to identify/authenticate users and organize its rating and web-of-trust system), it's not required to use bitcoins).
For example, address 16kfodhAckE8FZQpNcDwzG3tDGxypGTdwm. Who is behind it? You can see the transactions there, but is it mine? Is one of the addresses that sent coins to it mine? Which one? None of that information can be found from the blockchain.
Being as that address has been publicly advertized (it's used for accepting donations) by its owner (ufasoft, who made one of the popular CPU-based mining programs), we know at least the online identity of the owner. But we have no idea what other addresses he owns. For all we know (actually, I know at least one of them is a real donation, as I sent it, but all the other ones are mysteries), all the transactions there are him "donating" to himself.
They are traceable within the system, but not to an actual person. You see bitcoins being transferred between addresses, but there's no way to link those addresses to actual people. It's like watching transactions between numbered bank accounts. There's no way to tell who those accounts belong to just from that information.
It is possible to figure out address ownership from outside if you controlled a considerable fraction of the network (so you could link addresses to IP addresses, though this is potentially defeatible via proxies or onion routing or similar) and/or that currency is transferred out of the system (converted to US dollars or some other currency via an exchange) via a means you can monitor.
1. Coin ownership is determined by possession of the private key for that bitcoin address. If you don't have that private key, you can't sign a transaction using those coins, and thus can't spend them.
2. Because when you transfer coins, you announce that to everyone you are connected to, and they send it on to everyone they are connected to, etc. If you send out two transactions involving the same coins, everyone will be able to see that (you can determine the value held by each address by tracing through the blockchain and adding up all the transactions involving that address) and know there are no longer any bitcoins at that/those address(es). One of the transactions will go through (the first transaction to be received by the majority of the network. Which one that is depends on network latency, etc.), and the other ones will be rejected as the inputs (the addresses coins are being removed from) will be invalid (they won't contain the amount of coins you say they do).
3. Your wallet doesn't contain coins. It contains the public-private keypairs for each address you own, each of which has some amount of currency associated with it. You can think of it like a bunch of keys to safe deposit boxes, each of which contains some amount of currency. You spend that currency by giving the key(s) to that box(es) to someone else and thus transferring the currency within to a box owned by them. If the amount in the box(es) isn't equal to the amount you wanted to send, you will get a new box and the key for it that contains the remainder. Duplicating the keys would not duplicate the box itself.
Mostly right, but a few corrections
1. The blocks aren't worth 50 bitcoins, that's a subsidy for finding the block, which serves to introduce and distribute the currency over time.
2. It's 2016 blocks, not 2048 when a difficulty change occurs.
3. It's not half the remaining blocks (the block chain will keep growing forever. generating blocks is what makes the currency run, as you explained). this occurs every 210,000 blocks and should occur for the first time sometime between mid 2012 to early 2013..
4. The block chain doesn't need to be kept in RAM, it just needs to be stored (i.e. on a hard drive).
5. The minimum transaction and minimum fee are a temporary measure to prevent transaction spamming (sending tons of tiny transactions to slow the network) and is likely to be adjusted in the near future due to the increase in value.
6. Again, the 1MB/block limit is a temporary measure to keep the blockchain from growing too fast. Currently, no block is getting close to that, with most blocks ranging in the tens of kilobytes.
7. Difficulty manipulation is a definite potential problem. In principle, this is solvable by making the network large enough that such an attack is infeasible.
8. SHA-256 being broken is another potential problem, though theoretically, it would be possible to switch to a new hash algorithm (e.g. SHA-3) on the fly in the middle of the chain as long as the majority of the network agrees on it.
Not every bookseller wants to be known as an adult book store.
Yet Amazon clearly wants to, judging by the vast assortment of such material available on their site.
Were Michael and Terri Schiavo famous prior to the massive amount of bullshit (Protests around the hospital, death threats to both the husband and relatives, etc.) surrounding that incident? I sure as fuck wouldn't need that around me at a time like this.
Their AS number looks legit. RIPE NCC shows that AS 50066 belongs to a company by that name.
http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searchtext=AS50066&do_search=Search
Still, they should end it with Chapter 11 and burning in hell.
Are you sure you don't mean Chapter 7 (liquidation) as opposed to Chapter 11 (reorganization)
354 ml is every bit as much a 'measure' of what's in the bottle as 16 fl. oz. is.
There are two measurements on every box, can, and bottle: metric and US
And which of those measurements is a number you can do math on (e.g. 591ml bottle, 460kJ per 250ml, how many kJ per bottle?) without a calculator/pen&paper? Granted, this is marketing manipulation, but unit games are what facilitates it.
Since at least the 70s, everyone has been taught the metric system in school.
To a questionable degree of completeness, judging by the number of people I talk to who can't grok that watt-seconds=joules and insist on assemblages like x per second per watt.
DSL ISPs used to be common carriers. Cable ISPs never were.
Both should be common carriers.
I've heard FTTH (Fibre To The Home) or FTTP (...Premises).
AT&T's uverse currently uses FTTN or Fibre To The Node (fibre to the DSLAM, then copper from there), which is a useful compromise/stop gap if you use VDSL2 and keep the loop lengths short (<1km).
Printed in metric perhaps, but definitely not measured in metric, barring litre and two litre bottles. Unless there's some other good reason to use non-round numbers, like 355ml, other than the fact it lines up with a round imperial measurement, like 12 fluid ounces. Or 591ml bottles, which is 20 ounces. Or 710ml, which is 24 ounces.
And by that time trains are obsolete already.
I really rather doubt trains are ever going to be obsolete, barring us figuring out cheap teleportation. There's simply no better method of moving stuff en masse across land.
Correction, that should be petaFLOPS, not teraFLOPS, and 40 quadrillion, not trillion, integer ops.
Also mistyped my years figure. That should be 269,000,000,000,000 (269 trillion) years, not 269 quadrillion. The stars comment remains accurate.
Assuming you knew the password was exactly 12 characters. There are lots more (about 2*10^22) passwords up to 12 characters long. If you set Jaguar to the task, you should have it done in two or three decades. Or maybe a month if you had the entire TOP500 at your disposal.
Although the NSA can also brute-force any 128-bit key in a few months
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Go back to math class and retake that part about exponents. 2^128 is a damn big number of keys. If you put the entire TOP500 to the task of brute forcing a 128-bit key, you might have it done in time to watch the last white dwarf in the universe go cold.
10s of years? You have no sense of scale.
The combined Rpeak of the top 10 supercomputers is about 19 teraFLOPS, let's assume that equals to about 40 trillion integer operations per second.
Let's use 128-bit AES, so there's 2^128 possible keys.
just to increment through all those keys, never mind checking them, would require those systems for 269,000,000,000,000,000 years. While you'd probably find the right key in about half that time, it will still be long after the last stars go cold and dark.
Each bit you add to the key length doubles the keyspace. 56-bit DES is trivial to crack with specialized hardware, 128-bit is all but impossible. And never mind 256-bit.