Spoken like someone who can only see in black and white. Security by obscurity IS security, it can be very effective security, it just shouldn't be relied on in place of other security methods.
There are almost certainly dozens, likely hundreds, of critical bugs in all major operating systems. All of which are currently secured purely by people not being aware of them due to the complexity of the systems. The majority will never be found because the method of exploitation is sufficiently obscure that no one will pull the pieces together.
When one of those exploits is spotted by a 'white hat' then the immediate question should be how likely is it that a 'black hat' has already discovered this and that it is being widely exploited? If so, then how much damage would be done during a reasonable private notice period to the vendor vs the likely damage that would be done if it is disclosed publicly straight away?
In a real world scenario it is naive at best to think that the public release will cause less problems.
No one is forcing anyone to hold money in USD, even US citizens, so it's pretty obviously hyperbolic to call inflation 'government violence to take property'. Government policy will always have a massive influence on individual wealth. If they discourage smoking it harms the wealth of tobacco companies, off-licenses etc. If drugs are illegal it limits revenue/profit for legal companies and increases it for illegal drug dealers. If they build a new road it changes the value of property, the geographical location of demand for goods and services, the market for trains and planes etc. That's an inevitable consequence of government; but at least they tend to be more moderate than what you could expect if they didn't exist.
Gold would only be a scam if the first people who discovered it, or found a value for it, knew that there was a limited supply and by increasing demand for it they would get richer. IPOs are also a pretty rubbish counter-example as the Facebook one demonstrated brilliantly; a lot of the people who got in on that early got burnt.
The reasons I stay well away from BTC are that firstly it shares too many traits with ponzi schemes and I'm not confident that I could accurately pick the point to get in and come out ahead. Secondly, unlike major currencies backed by governments there is very little confidence supporting BTC. The people holding money in BTC are doing so because they believe the value will increase not because they think it is a safe alternative to national currency. People get involved with BTC because they think it will make them money, not because they actually want to hold money in that format. It will take very little to destroy a currency that survives on that premise.
Not quite true, although it is a fair counter-argument. Thoughts (brains) cannot currently be 'searched' and thus anything that requires those thoughts to get to (in an understandable form). The issue with thoughts is that there's very little you can do if someone refuses to share them except punish them for not sharing them. If the guy had said he couldn't remember the password, do you allow a judge to lock him up on the basis that he doesn't believe it?
Should be reasonably easy to handle. Put the real password through a password rating system and then generate alternative passwords with similar rankings.
It's not a stupid idea, even if a lot of commentators on here can't see past their hatred of anyone requiring anything from them. It has been shown time and again that people don't like paying, even pennies, up front for something but are happy to hand over things worth far more (personal information, viewing time etc) after they have become users. Even though theoretically it would cost them more to provide computing time for bitcoins than just pay you there are many people who won't pay but wouldn't care about compute time (electric costs etc) and no personal details would need to be exchanged.
All that said, it just isn't worth it. The amount you can mine would be comparatively limited and is getting lower as mining kit becomes more advanced; additionally you'd have to handle any issues this causes for users, have people claiming you're stealing and bad press (like here) and the value will continue to fall. Additionally as phones and tablets become more popular the average resources available to mine with have shrunk as well.
Another pretty obvious alternative result would be that companies would increase prices to make up for any tax increase, like they've done with tax increases in the past. You're also missing the point that this would be instead of a tax on profits so if the total amount of money raised was the same then any company which isn't currently avoiding taxation would end up paying less tax. Some issues aren't simple black and white; think a little harder about likely consequences when you think it really is that simple.
No it isn't. We've put a two year ban across a vast geographical area that will lead to increased food costs, greater environmental damage as farmers move to older more toxic pesticides and pesticide immunity issues. In return we have done something that there is no real evidence will help bee populations in such a way that we won't even be able to tell if the ban solves it.
Science would have been banning them in a smaller area (for example Britain or Spain/Portugal) and comparing against the rest of the region. What this is, is a massive over-reaction. We may as well try banning 3g masts, they came in around the same time, maybe they are to blame? Surely, by your logic, that would be the 'scientific' thing to do?
Wake up global citizens. Islam is making war on you, *every day*.
No it isn't and you're deluded assertions don't alter that. There doesn't have to be a 'fight to the death' but you, and those like you, who ARE the problem would certainly bring one about if you got the chance.
When the inventor can't easily explain what the best uses for their invention are, it's a safe bet there really aren't any.
Almost the exact opposite you'll hear from anyone doing theoretical research. One of the biggest changes that came with the iPhone wasn't what the device could do but the app infrastructure; that infrastructure meant that what people could do with the iPhone expanded rapidly and well beyond what was initially expected. Sticking with apple there first computers were basically sold on the premise of do what you want with it; they didn't have a list of specific things it would help you do (or at least one that was remotely useful anyway)
There are way, way too many questions about Google Glass to know whether it'll achieve much or not. I have doubts but would love to be proved wrong.
What I'm saying is that Bitcoin is DEFINED to have that value.
If it was then it failed and was always going to. You can't just say something has a value because that's what you want it to be. If I cut my toenails I don't get to define the value as the value of my time used to do it. You can keep putting the word definition in caps as much as you want but it does not mean what you seem to think it means. As others keep pointing out all that is defined about bitcoins that is remotely related is the cost of production.
I'm pretty sure it would be because if I could pay 1,000 bitcoins to have someone mine 1,100 bitcoins then why would I spend bitcoins on anything else until it wasn't possible any more? Also if you had a computing resource capable of producing 1BTC every hour why would you rent it to people for 0.9BTC per hour?
A billion lightning bolts really doesn't tell us very much and I'd be disinclined to just pretend that 'dark lightning' behaves in the same manner; however if it was, and if it did, then the odds of being hit by lightning ~1/1,000,000, thus odds of 'dark lightning' hitting you is ~1/1,000,000,000. If you're making any kind of decision based on a 1 in 1 billion chance of something happening to you each year then you are wasting your time.
As I said, the research is interesting and I look forward to seeing what they find out; However, one of the least important things about this research is the fact that it may or may not indicate that a tiny number of people are being exposed to radiation. ~24,000 people die each year from the emissions of coal power plants in the US, it would make far more difference to your chances of dying/getting a medical condition if you chose a house ~1% further away from the nearest coal plant than the risk of dark lightning while flying does.
However, because there’s only about one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes and because pilots take great pains to avoid thunderstorms, Dwyer says, the risk of injury is quite limited. No one knows for sure if anyone has ever been hit by dark lightning.
It's an interesting claim and I look forward to hearing more about it but there is effectively no risk to people flying being suggested. Unfortunately/. has decided to focus on the non-existent risk rather than the rather interesting properties of 'dark lightning' and what study of it could help us to understand.
No; it's impolite to needlessly criticise people for something you can trivially work around anyway. If I have guests who need to access email/whatever I'm not going to refuse or breathe down their neck; nor am I going to spend ages 'teaching' them how to safely use my PC like some techno-primodonna.
I'll either lend them an old android tablet or put them on a VM session.
Surely the point is equally true in reverse? When using an internationally frequented forum don't assume people are using the US 'definition' of America or that they are obligated to do so to be polite. Your point about German isn't really relevant as we're not speaking 'American' in the USA; we're speaking English on a forum used by people from dozens, or probably hundreds, of countries.
It's not unlike London in WWII (no sky scrapers there) and there was still lots of effect from bombing it.
And London wasn't flattened or even close to flattened. I should know I still have living relatives who were there during the blitz. Your hyperbole betrays your claims to know the facts. There's no reason for NK to start an intensive shelling campaign against SK; they'll give the US/SK an excuse to decimate NK positions 'in defence' and potentially even target their senior military figures without China having any cover to interfere.
NK will keep dicking around at the edges or it will go full in; there's no other option that makes sense (not that those do either mind). It seems the US and SK have finally decided that all the posturing really is a bark without a bite and are willing to ignore it now.
This. It isn't rocket science to work out how much extra power would be required and what the BitCoin mining return is worth. I have my doubts that it'll be cost effective, and am nearly certain that finding a way to lower power use instead would be better, but there's no need to guess when testing would be easy.
Seriously who cares that 11% of projects got no pledges. The article implies this shows how hard it is for many to get funding. I'd suggest that it shows that it is easy to set up a kickstarter and that some people play about with it on non-serious projects etc. The utopian ideal some ascribe to Kickstarter is that it allows people to create things without having to battle through traditional funding models etc; does anyone really think that the projects that failed on Kickstarter would have had a better chance of getting funded otherwise?
More on topic; as somebody pointed out on that shoe-company site; postal services are supposed to look for suspiciously marked packages. A package heavily marked "Atheist" might be considered a be a bit suspicious,
And what, throw anything more 'suspicious' looking away 10 times as often as they normal? Sounds like a pretty stupid idea even if that was what they were trying to do.
I'm going to stick this one down as justice though certainly the sentence may also act as a deterrent. The guy 'knowingly' did something that could easily end in the death of another person for amusement. What he did is not manifestly different from throwing a concrete slab off a bridge onto a road to try and hit a car or firing a gun into a crowd.
That said, a shorter sentence (perhaps 3-6 months) would likely have been more than enough to 'punish' him in my opinion, but then I think most custodial sentences are too long.
Like millions of other families just like them they live for the next paycheck, they have no other choice, they simply cannot afford the luxury of a 3 week cash buffer, let alone 3 months. And all this is in Australia which has a much better social "safety net" than the US.
It may not be easy, and may even be very hard but it simply isn't true to say it isn't possible; and dismissing it as such simply makes it easier for people who decide it is 'too hard' to justify not doing so because it's impossible. What I realised early on in life is that having money makes it easier to get more money. Living pay cheque to pay cheque means you make decisions based on cash flow rather than cost. $5 a day is $2000 in a year, after a couple of years you at least have enough saved that you can handle most one-off expenses and make decisions that are cheaper in the long run.
Yes there are people who have no savings through no fault of there own; there are vastly more who have no savings because they didn't take perfectly reasonable steps and viable steps to, where circumstances outside there control may affect them but not entirely determine them.
The idea of offering a $20m prize isn't that it will completely cover the cost of doing it but that it will change the balance of risk and reward enough. Producing a cost effective way of putting a vehicle on the moon will be worth money in sponsorship, IP rights and sales of technology, and the future business opportunities that come from being able to do it.
Is $20m enough? I don't know as it isn't something I know enough about but it could make a considerable difference to a company that was considering doing it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like someone who can only see in black and white. Security by obscurity IS security, it can be very effective security, it just shouldn't be relied on in place of other security methods.
There are almost certainly dozens, likely hundreds, of critical bugs in all major operating systems. All of which are currently secured purely by people not being aware of them due to the complexity of the systems. The majority will never be found because the method of exploitation is sufficiently obscure that no one will pull the pieces together.
When one of those exploits is spotted by a 'white hat' then the immediate question should be how likely is it that a 'black hat' has already discovered this and that it is being widely exploited? If so, then how much damage would be done during a reasonable private notice period to the vendor vs the likely damage that would be done if it is disclosed publicly straight away?
In a real world scenario it is naive at best to think that the public release will cause less problems.
No one is forcing anyone to hold money in USD, even US citizens, so it's pretty obviously hyperbolic to call inflation 'government violence to take property'. Government policy will always have a massive influence on individual wealth. If they discourage smoking it harms the wealth of tobacco companies, off-licenses etc. If drugs are illegal it limits revenue/profit for legal companies and increases it for illegal drug dealers. If they build a new road it changes the value of property, the geographical location of demand for goods and services, the market for trains and planes etc. That's an inevitable consequence of government; but at least they tend to be more moderate than what you could expect if they didn't exist.
Gold would only be a scam if the first people who discovered it, or found a value for it, knew that there was a limited supply and by increasing demand for it they would get richer. IPOs are also a pretty rubbish counter-example as the Facebook one demonstrated brilliantly; a lot of the people who got in on that early got burnt.
The reasons I stay well away from BTC are that firstly it shares too many traits with ponzi schemes and I'm not confident that I could accurately pick the point to get in and come out ahead. Secondly, unlike major currencies backed by governments there is very little confidence supporting BTC. The people holding money in BTC are doing so because they believe the value will increase not because they think it is a safe alternative to national currency. People get involved with BTC because they think it will make them money, not because they actually want to hold money in that format. It will take very little to destroy a currency that survives on that premise.
Not quite true, although it is a fair counter-argument. Thoughts (brains) cannot currently be 'searched' and thus anything that requires those thoughts to get to (in an understandable form). The issue with thoughts is that there's very little you can do if someone refuses to share them except punish them for not sharing them. If the guy had said he couldn't remember the password, do you allow a judge to lock him up on the basis that he doesn't believe it?
Should be reasonably easy to handle. Put the real password through a password rating system and then generate alternative passwords with similar rankings.
Yeah that's definitely going to work out well for the developer :p
It's not a stupid idea, even if a lot of commentators on here can't see past their hatred of anyone requiring anything from them. It has been shown time and again that people don't like paying, even pennies, up front for something but are happy to hand over things worth far more (personal information, viewing time etc) after they have become users. Even though theoretically it would cost them more to provide computing time for bitcoins than just pay you there are many people who won't pay but wouldn't care about compute time (electric costs etc) and no personal details would need to be exchanged.
All that said, it just isn't worth it. The amount you can mine would be comparatively limited and is getting lower as mining kit becomes more advanced; additionally you'd have to handle any issues this causes for users, have people claiming you're stealing and bad press (like here) and the value will continue to fall. Additionally as phones and tablets become more popular the average resources available to mine with have shrunk as well.
Another pretty obvious alternative result would be that companies would increase prices to make up for any tax increase, like they've done with tax increases in the past. You're also missing the point that this would be instead of a tax on profits so if the total amount of money raised was the same then any company which isn't currently avoiding taxation would end up paying less tax. Some issues aren't simple black and white; think a little harder about likely consequences when you think it really is that simple.
No it isn't. We've put a two year ban across a vast geographical area that will lead to increased food costs, greater environmental damage as farmers move to older more toxic pesticides and pesticide immunity issues. In return we have done something that there is no real evidence will help bee populations in such a way that we won't even be able to tell if the ban solves it.
Science would have been banning them in a smaller area (for example Britain or Spain/Portugal) and comparing against the rest of the region. What this is, is a massive over-reaction. We may as well try banning 3g masts, they came in around the same time, maybe they are to blame? Surely, by your logic, that would be the 'scientific' thing to do?
No it isn't and you're deluded assertions don't alter that. There doesn't have to be a 'fight to the death' but you, and those like you, who ARE the problem would certainly bring one about if you got the chance.
Almost the exact opposite you'll hear from anyone doing theoretical research. One of the biggest changes that came with the iPhone wasn't what the device could do but the app infrastructure; that infrastructure meant that what people could do with the iPhone expanded rapidly and well beyond what was initially expected. Sticking with apple there first computers were basically sold on the premise of do what you want with it; they didn't have a list of specific things it would help you do (or at least one that was remotely useful anyway)
There are way, way too many questions about Google Glass to know whether it'll achieve much or not. I have doubts but would love to be proved wrong.
If it was then it failed and was always going to. You can't just say something has a value because that's what you want it to be. If I cut my toenails I don't get to define the value as the value of my time used to do it. You can keep putting the word definition in caps as much as you want but it does not mean what you seem to think it means. As others keep pointing out all that is defined about bitcoins that is remotely related is the cost of production.
I'm pretty sure it would be because if I could pay 1,000 bitcoins to have someone mine 1,100 bitcoins then why would I spend bitcoins on anything else until it wasn't possible any more? Also if you had a computing resource capable of producing 1BTC every hour why would you rent it to people for 0.9BTC per hour?
Thank you for the quote ;) I've always got time for a bit of Pratchett.
A billion lightning bolts really doesn't tell us very much and I'd be disinclined to just pretend that 'dark lightning' behaves in the same manner; however if it was, and if it did, then the odds of being hit by lightning ~1/1,000,000, thus odds of 'dark lightning' hitting you is ~1/1,000,000,000. If you're making any kind of decision based on a 1 in 1 billion chance of something happening to you each year then you are wasting your time.
As I said, the research is interesting and I look forward to seeing what they find out; However, one of the least important things about this research is the fact that it may or may not indicate that a tiny number of people are being exposed to radiation. ~24,000 people die each year from the emissions of coal power plants in the US, it would make far more difference to your chances of dying/getting a medical condition if you chose a house ~1% further away from the nearest coal plant than the risk of dark lightning while flying does.
It's an interesting claim and I look forward to hearing more about it but there is effectively no risk to people flying being suggested. Unfortunately /. has decided to focus on the non-existent risk rather than the rather interesting properties of 'dark lightning' and what study of it could help us to understand.
No; it's impolite to needlessly criticise people for something you can trivially work around anyway. If I have guests who need to access email/whatever I'm not going to refuse or breathe down their neck; nor am I going to spend ages 'teaching' them how to safely use my PC like some techno-primodonna.
I'll either lend them an old android tablet or put them on a VM session.
Surely the point is equally true in reverse? When using an internationally frequented forum don't assume people are using the US 'definition' of America or that they are obligated to do so to be polite. Your point about German isn't really relevant as we're not speaking 'American' in the USA; we're speaking English on a forum used by people from dozens, or probably hundreds, of countries.
And London wasn't flattened or even close to flattened. I should know I still have living relatives who were there during the blitz. Your hyperbole betrays your claims to know the facts. There's no reason for NK to start an intensive shelling campaign against SK; they'll give the US/SK an excuse to decimate NK positions 'in defence' and potentially even target their senior military figures without China having any cover to interfere.
NK will keep dicking around at the edges or it will go full in; there's no other option that makes sense (not that those do either mind). It seems the US and SK have finally decided that all the posturing really is a bark without a bite and are willing to ignore it now.
This. It isn't rocket science to work out how much extra power would be required and what the BitCoin mining return is worth. I have my doubts that it'll be cost effective, and am nearly certain that finding a way to lower power use instead would be better, but there's no need to guess when testing would be easy.
Seriously who cares that 11% of projects got no pledges. The article implies this shows how hard it is for many to get funding. I'd suggest that it shows that it is easy to set up a kickstarter and that some people play about with it on non-serious projects etc. The utopian ideal some ascribe to Kickstarter is that it allows people to create things without having to battle through traditional funding models etc; does anyone really think that the projects that failed on Kickstarter would have had a better chance of getting funded otherwise?
And what, throw anything more 'suspicious' looking away 10 times as often as they normal? Sounds like a pretty stupid idea even if that was what they were trying to do.
I'm going to stick this one down as justice though certainly the sentence may also act as a deterrent. The guy 'knowingly' did something that could easily end in the death of another person for amusement. What he did is not manifestly different from throwing a concrete slab off a bridge onto a road to try and hit a car or firing a gun into a crowd.
That said, a shorter sentence (perhaps 3-6 months) would likely have been more than enough to 'punish' him in my opinion, but then I think most custodial sentences are too long.
It may not be easy, and may even be very hard but it simply isn't true to say it isn't possible; and dismissing it as such simply makes it easier for people who decide it is 'too hard' to justify not doing so because it's impossible. What I realised early on in life is that having money makes it easier to get more money. Living pay cheque to pay cheque means you make decisions based on cash flow rather than cost. $5 a day is $2000 in a year, after a couple of years you at least have enough saved that you can handle most one-off expenses and make decisions that are cheaper in the long run.
Yes there are people who have no savings through no fault of there own; there are vastly more who have no savings because they didn't take perfectly reasonable steps and viable steps to, where circumstances outside there control may affect them but not entirely determine them.
The idea of offering a $20m prize isn't that it will completely cover the cost of doing it but that it will change the balance of risk and reward enough. Producing a cost effective way of putting a vehicle on the moon will be worth money in sponsorship, IP rights and sales of technology, and the future business opportunities that come from being able to do it.
Is $20m enough? I don't know as it isn't something I know enough about but it could make a considerable difference to a company that was considering doing it anyway.