You say "I have a tough time believing that would work in court", when in fact IT WOULD, GUARENTEED, because that is how the proceeds of crime works in common law. If I steal your watch, and sell it on eBay, and the police can track down the guy that bought the watch - that watch can be siezed, and the guy who bought it is not entitled to anything in return from the police. If he wants anything back, he has to SUE the criminal in civil court. I see absolutely no reason exact same thing would happen with bitcoin transactions. Someone would have to explain to me exactly why they could not be siezed, because all logic tells me they can, and quite easily because they are so traceable.
The problem with BitCoin is it is nowhere near as anonymous as people think it is. In fact, it is even less anonymous than current currencies.
Consider the dollar. If I take a dollar in cash and deposit it in the bank, and transfer it to you, and you take it out of the bank - that dollar is now different. Those two dollars have different serial numbers. This is because in the eyes of the government, the law, and everyone under the sun, all individual dollars are the same and interchangeable - my dollar is as good as your dollar. This is what makes money laundering possible and why governments have a hard time battling it - it is pretty easy to funnel money from crime into another medium / person and "wash" the money in a way that makes it totally impossible to tie it to a specific crime, because all dollars are the same.
BitCoin is not like this. A bitcoin is a unique value and as it is passed from one wallet to another, that transaction is logged throughout the network. For any given bitcoin, you can trace the path of THAT SPECIFIC COIN from the time it was created to where it was today - seeing all of the wallets it passed through and what IP address owned that wallet at the time. All law enforcement needs to do to tie a specific bitcoin to a specific individual, for the purposes of an investigation, is to tie a wallet ID to an individual. Thus, any bitcoins used during the process of ANY CRIME are subject to seizure! I have never had anyone explain to me how to get around this problem with BitCoin. People have weird pseudo-anonymous hacks like "use ToR" or "Use a VPN", but all these things do is make it HARDER to tie an individual to a wallet, it is not impossible. In fact with the proper warrants and wire-taps it is trivial to tie a wallet to an individual.
You seem to be missing the connection that the money laundering laws are what contain the regulations forcing reporting limit in the first place. Without money laundering laws these regulations would not exist, because companies will not incurr the overhead cost for no reason. "If the money is traceable, it's traceable" - but without anti-money laundering laws, it would all be untraceable. That is the whole point of the laws.
This kind of short-sighted answer is the problem with BitCoin backers.
Anti-money laundering laws and regulations are very important because they are what forces the systems that allow law enforcement to determine and sieze the proceeds of crime. Without such siezing, the incentivization of crime increases exponentially.
IE - say I rob a bank. If it is trivial for me to convert the money to bitcoin and transfer to a third party in an untraceable way, then my incentivization for robbing banks is now HUGE, because even if I get caught, I will still be able to keep my proceeds. Get caught robbing bank, go to jail for 10 years, get out, and buy your own island. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Nothing you just posted said anything at all about why or if NaCL running on LLVM should be considered more secure than Java running on a JVM. The reason so many people have been against Java in the browser has a lot more to do with constant security issues than performance. This NaCL system seems like it would be a ripe target for exploits.
"Chrome fetches and translates the portable executable into an architecture-specific machine code optimized directly for the underlying device. This translation approach means developers donâ(TM)t need to recompile their applications multiple times to run across x86, ARM or MIPS devices.'
First of all.. the first line managers do not decide these kind of ranking systems. The upper-levels and HR execs do. The best managers try to work AROUND the system they are forced to live in.
Second, stack ranking is not common in silicon valley companies at all. It is old-school large companies like GE, Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, etc. that employ it.
I am glad you feel that way, because I stopped using Firefox because it's extensions are not up to par with Chrome extensions. I got tired of extensions not syncing transparently across my many computers. I got tied of extensions constantly being disabled every time I upgraded the browser. I got tired of not having amazing extensions like SilverBird and Checker Plus and and having to put up with crappy, clunky alternatives. Finally I got tired of having to install extensions in Firefox for things that just come for free in Chrome in the first place.
- You don't need to be available for a live chat. You can book an appointment in advance, and it's all integrated with G+ and Google Calendar.
- Some things YouTube videos can help with. Some things, it can't. Try learning the guitar through only YouTube, you will quickly find that without that feedback from the instructor, you won't get very far. Helpouts will work great for the kinds of things people want live instruction for. Currently, if you want live instruction on Yoga or playing the flute, you need to find a local teacher and pay them. Now you can source this kind of live instruction online.
"This is not facial recognition attached to a database of faces. This is no different than a clerk waling up to people in different demographics and pointing out different sales that may interest them. That it is done by computer rather than a person is irrelevant."
It's actually quite different, because if it was a clerk doing it, then it would be Racial Profiling or Sex Profiling. Apparently if a computer does it instead, that makes it OK.
It's easy to say "teachers who can't teach shoudl be fired" without looking at that fact that in many states the annual salary for a teacher is a paltry 35K / year or under. NO ONE wants to teach because they are paid horribly, are constantly lambasted by the public, and in many inner cities it is a dangerous job to boot. Teaching is not paid at the level it should be in the united states. You aren't going to get good teachers if you don't pay them a living wage.
The idea is sound but it's simply too many shares. He doesn't even need to perform well because the stock could tank 50% and he would still get almost 40 million dollars. Cut the number of shares by 75% and it makes more sense.
Putting aside the fact that said laws are illogical - the reason you don't do that is because there is a law explicitly forbidding it. Last I checked there is no law explicitly forbidding wearing Google Glass.
I think people are reacting to this too quickly without thinking through the ramifications.
If Glass was off while driving, then it is no different than driving any other piece of clothing or technology. What is the difference between driving with Glass on your head and turned off, than driving with your cell phone in your pocket.
For anyone who would say "Should you get a ticket for wearing a why would you be wearing it if it's off", my response would be, why not.
Well and now you point to the big difference between the industries. See, in the film industry, a RDJ or a Wheadon can make $30 million in 6 months on a blockbuster, and then spend the next 6 months working on smaller pictures, and even an indie or two, because they have money to do it with. Look at films like "Much Ado About Nothing" - an Amazing film, filled with A-list talent, received rave reviews at TIFF - yet, that movie is not going to make any money at all and I expect most of the actors were paid very little for their time. Which is fine, because no one who worked on it expected a giant payday. They did it because of the love of the craft.
The game industry does not work like this because "the talent" does not get a big enough share of the profit - when was the last time you heard of a head creative or a head developer making 20 million on a game - it doesn't happen. If it did, then they would probably be financing more side projects, again for the love of the craft, and because it keeps them "fresh" as actors and directors.
This is what really needs to be solved. It is not about changing the industry, it is about changing the compensation model. When people work 60+ hour weeks for a month or two to get BattleField 4 out on time, they should be getting a bigger piece of the pie than just their salary. There should be profit sharing involved. And key people - like the lead developers and lead creatives - should get a big enough share of that profit to motivate them and entice them to use it on other projects to keep them fresh.
" There are hundreds upon hundreds of people working full time on it, and hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in its development. "
How many people do you think it took to make The Avengers? How many millions?
The video game industry is starting to mirror the film industry, with studio houses having one or two giant blockbusters every month, and using profits from those to fund the smaller "filler" films. And then, you have the even smaller, independant type films, such as what ends up at Sundance or TIFF.
Normally what causes the group to become differentiated is not a matter of "all at the same time". Groups become differentiated because they stop cross-breeding outside the group, due to either environmental or social barriers. Over time, these isolated groups develop their own mutations that are specific to them. And over an even longer period of time, they would not be able to reproduce with animals in the other group. It's no different than the process that resulted in humans evolving different feature sets in different regions of the wold, because of isolation... if humans had remained isolated and never developed technology, then eventually we would have split into many different species.
I don't see how this contradicts the traditional definition of a species. Mules are infertile. Therefore they would not survive as a species in the first place if it were not for human breeders. They would just be essentially one-offs that happened occasionally in the wild, and die off. This is how evolution works; the mule would not be a successful species evolutionarily speaking.
The true definition of species is a group that can and do inter-breed to make offspring. So, the line actually *IS* very clear cut... as soon as a mutation occurs that branches one set so they can no longer reproduce with the other, it is a new species. The problem is, determining that point in history using only archeology is very difficult and full of guesswork. Even if you have the DNA from all 3 sides of the tree, we aren't adept enough yet to be able to look at two pieces of DNA and say "yes these two could reproduce and make viable offspring", vs. "yes these two could reproduce but their offspring would all be sterile". That is when you form a new species.
VirtualBox "being Oracle" is a pretty crappy attitude to have. Yes it is funded and written by Oracle employees, but it is also 100% GPL*. You can't say that about VMWare. For an Open Source solution VirtualBox is very full featured and VMWare does not have much to hold over it at all. Compared to the other open source virtualization solution - KVM - the usability and support for various configurations is head and shoulders above. What's more, Virtualbox works on Windows and Mac, something KVM can not do.
* Oracle holds a couple of things out of the main codebase and only allows their download as a free add-on - namely, USB support in the VM.
First of all, RE PageRank... If people think PageRank is still all Google uses to process search results, they are living in a reality distortion bubble. PageRank is 20 years old, and everyone knows how it works. Google's algorithm relies on a lot more than PageRank, in fact PageRank is probably a very minor factor nowadays in what decides the top 50 results of a search.
Second, search is about a lot more than answering questions, and this is what I think people still don't fully understand about why Google is what it is and why they own this field so much. Search is just as much about FINDING the actual question, as asking the question itself. When people go to Google they often don't actually KNOW the question yet, all they have is something they want to know about. The real questions come later.
The reason Henry Ford paid his people better was so that they would have the money to buy his cars, thus increasing sales, thus higher value. That was his argument and it's why the lawsuit was defeated in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
You say "I have a tough time believing that would work in court", when in fact IT WOULD, GUARENTEED, because that is how the proceeds of crime works in common law. If I steal your watch, and sell it on eBay, and the police can track down the guy that bought the watch - that watch can be siezed, and the guy who bought it is not entitled to anything in return from the police. If he wants anything back, he has to SUE the criminal in civil court. I see absolutely no reason exact same thing would happen with bitcoin transactions. Someone would have to explain to me exactly why they could not be siezed, because all logic tells me they can, and quite easily because they are so traceable.
The problem with BitCoin is it is nowhere near as anonymous as people think it is. In fact, it is even less anonymous than current currencies.
Consider the dollar. If I take a dollar in cash and deposit it in the bank, and transfer it to you, and you take it out of the bank - that dollar is now different. Those two dollars have different serial numbers. This is because in the eyes of the government, the law, and everyone under the sun, all individual dollars are the same and interchangeable - my dollar is as good as your dollar. This is what makes money laundering possible and why governments have a hard time battling it - it is pretty easy to funnel money from crime into another medium / person and "wash" the money in a way that makes it totally impossible to tie it to a specific crime, because all dollars are the same.
BitCoin is not like this. A bitcoin is a unique value and as it is passed from one wallet to another, that transaction is logged throughout the network. For any given bitcoin, you can trace the path of THAT SPECIFIC COIN from the time it was created to where it was today - seeing all of the wallets it passed through and what IP address owned that wallet at the time. All law enforcement needs to do to tie a specific bitcoin to a specific individual, for the purposes of an investigation, is to tie a wallet ID to an individual. Thus, any bitcoins used during the process of ANY CRIME are subject to seizure! I have never had anyone explain to me how to get around this problem with BitCoin. People have weird pseudo-anonymous hacks like "use ToR" or "Use a VPN", but all these things do is make it HARDER to tie an individual to a wallet, it is not impossible. In fact with the proper warrants and wire-taps it is trivial to tie a wallet to an individual.
You seem to be missing the connection that the money laundering laws are what contain the regulations forcing reporting limit in the first place. Without money laundering laws these regulations would not exist, because companies will not incurr the overhead cost for no reason. "If the money is traceable, it's traceable" - but without anti-money laundering laws, it would all be untraceable. That is the whole point of the laws.
This kind of short-sighted answer is the problem with BitCoin backers.
Anti-money laundering laws and regulations are very important because they are what forces the systems that allow law enforcement to determine and sieze the proceeds of crime. Without such siezing, the incentivization of crime increases exponentially.
IE - say I rob a bank. If it is trivial for me to convert the money to bitcoin and transfer to a third party in an untraceable way, then my incentivization for robbing banks is now HUGE, because even if I get caught, I will still be able to keep my proceeds. Get caught robbing bank, go to jail for 10 years, get out, and buy your own island. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Nothing you just posted said anything at all about why or if NaCL running on LLVM should be considered more secure than Java running on a JVM. The reason so many people have been against Java in the browser has a lot more to do with constant security issues than performance. This NaCL system seems like it would be a ripe target for exploits.
It's using LLVM, so yes.
"Chrome fetches and translates the portable executable into an architecture-specific machine code optimized directly for the underlying device. This translation approach means developers donâ(TM)t need to recompile their applications multiple times to run across x86, ARM or MIPS devices.'
Ummmm... sounds like Java?
First of all.. the first line managers do not decide these kind of ranking systems. The upper-levels and HR execs do. The best managers try to work AROUND the system they are forced to live in.
Second, stack ranking is not common in silicon valley companies at all. It is old-school large companies like GE, Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, etc. that employ it.
I am glad you feel that way, because I stopped using Firefox because it's extensions are not up to par with Chrome extensions. I got tired of extensions not syncing transparently across my many computers. I got tied of extensions constantly being disabled every time I upgraded the browser. I got tired of not having amazing extensions like SilverBird and Checker Plus and and having to put up with crappy, clunky alternatives. Finally I got tired of having to install extensions in Firefox for things that just come for free in Chrome in the first place.
A couple of points you are missing
- You don't need to be available for a live chat. You can book an appointment in advance, and it's all integrated with G+ and Google Calendar.
- Some things YouTube videos can help with. Some things, it can't. Try learning the guitar through only YouTube, you will quickly find that without that feedback from the instructor, you won't get very far. Helpouts will work great for the kinds of things people want live instruction for. Currently, if you want live instruction on Yoga or playing the flute, you need to find a local teacher and pay them. Now you can source this kind of live instruction online.
Just a thought, but I think you would want to be going through the court to get that information, not the police.
"This is not facial recognition attached to a database of faces. This is no different than a clerk waling up to people in different demographics and pointing out different sales that may interest them. That it is done by computer rather than a person is irrelevant."
It's actually quite different, because if it was a clerk doing it, then it would be Racial Profiling or Sex Profiling. Apparently if a computer does it instead, that makes it OK.
It's easy to say "teachers who can't teach shoudl be fired" without looking at that fact that in many states the annual salary for a teacher is a paltry 35K / year or under. NO ONE wants to teach because they are paid horribly, are constantly lambasted by the public, and in many inner cities it is a dangerous job to boot. Teaching is not paid at the level it should be in the united states. You aren't going to get good teachers if you don't pay them a living wage.
The idea is sound but it's simply too many shares. He doesn't even need to perform well because the stock could tank 50% and he would still get almost 40 million dollars. Cut the number of shares by 75% and it makes more sense.
Giving celebrities fake jobs at companies that they do nothing for except sell product as a PR stunt is all the rage right now.
Will.I.Am is a "Creative Director" at Intel
Alicia Keys is a "Creative Director" at Blackberry
Justin Timberlake is a "Creative Curator" for Anheuser-Busch
Lady Gaga is a "Creative Director" for Polaroid
The only "news" in this story is that Slashdot editors don't keep up to speed on social norms.
Putting aside the fact that said laws are illogical - the reason you don't do that is because there is a law explicitly forbidding it. Last I checked there is no law explicitly forbidding wearing Google Glass.
I think people are reacting to this too quickly without thinking through the ramifications.
If Glass was off while driving, then it is no different than driving any other piece of clothing or technology. What is the difference between driving with Glass on your head and turned off, than driving with your cell phone in your pocket.
For anyone who would say "Should you get a ticket for wearing a why would you be wearing it if it's off", my response would be, why not.
Well and now you point to the big difference between the industries. See, in the film industry, a RDJ or a Wheadon can make $30 million in 6 months on a blockbuster, and then spend the next 6 months working on smaller pictures, and even an indie or two, because they have money to do it with. Look at films like "Much Ado About Nothing" - an Amazing film, filled with A-list talent, received rave reviews at TIFF - yet, that movie is not going to make any money at all and I expect most of the actors were paid very little for their time. Which is fine, because no one who worked on it expected a giant payday. They did it because of the love of the craft.
The game industry does not work like this because "the talent" does not get a big enough share of the profit - when was the last time you heard of a head creative or a head developer making 20 million on a game - it doesn't happen. If it did, then they would probably be financing more side projects, again for the love of the craft, and because it keeps them "fresh" as actors and directors.
This is what really needs to be solved. It is not about changing the industry, it is about changing the compensation model. When people work 60+ hour weeks for a month or two to get BattleField 4 out on time, they should be getting a bigger piece of the pie than just their salary. There should be profit sharing involved. And key people - like the lead developers and lead creatives - should get a big enough share of that profit to motivate them and entice them to use it on other projects to keep them fresh.
" There are hundreds upon hundreds of people working full time on it, and hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in its development. "
How many people do you think it took to make The Avengers? How many millions?
The video game industry is starting to mirror the film industry, with studio houses having one or two giant blockbusters every month, and using profits from those to fund the smaller "filler" films. And then, you have the even smaller, independant type films, such as what ends up at Sundance or TIFF.
Normally what causes the group to become differentiated is not a matter of "all at the same time". Groups become differentiated because they stop cross-breeding outside the group, due to either environmental or social barriers. Over time, these isolated groups develop their own mutations that are specific to them. And over an even longer period of time, they would not be able to reproduce with animals in the other group. It's no different than the process that resulted in humans evolving different feature sets in different regions of the wold, because of isolation... if humans had remained isolated and never developed technology, then eventually we would have split into many different species.
I don't see how this contradicts the traditional definition of a species. Mules are infertile. Therefore they would not survive as a species in the first place if it were not for human breeders. They would just be essentially one-offs that happened occasionally in the wild, and die off. This is how evolution works; the mule would not be a successful species evolutionarily speaking.
The true definition of species is a group that can and do inter-breed to make offspring. So, the line actually *IS* very clear cut... as soon as a mutation occurs that branches one set so they can no longer reproduce with the other, it is a new species. The problem is, determining that point in history using only archeology is very difficult and full of guesswork. Even if you have the DNA from all 3 sides of the tree, we aren't adept enough yet to be able to look at two pieces of DNA and say "yes these two could reproduce and make viable offspring", vs. "yes these two could reproduce but their offspring would all be sterile". That is when you form a new species.
VirtualBox "being Oracle" is a pretty crappy attitude to have. Yes it is funded and written by Oracle employees, but it is also 100% GPL*. You can't say that about VMWare. For an Open Source solution VirtualBox is very full featured and VMWare does not have much to hold over it at all. Compared to the other open source virtualization solution - KVM - the usability and support for various configurations is head and shoulders above. What's more, Virtualbox works on Windows and Mac, something KVM can not do.
* Oracle holds a couple of things out of the main codebase and only allows their download as a free add-on - namely, USB support in the VM.
A couple of points.
First of all, RE PageRank... If people think PageRank is still all Google uses to process search results, they are living in a reality distortion bubble. PageRank is 20 years old, and everyone knows how it works. Google's algorithm relies on a lot more than PageRank, in fact PageRank is probably a very minor factor nowadays in what decides the top 50 results of a search.
Second, search is about a lot more than answering questions, and this is what I think people still don't fully understand about why Google is what it is and why they own this field so much. Search is just as much about FINDING the actual question, as asking the question itself. When people go to Google they often don't actually KNOW the question yet, all they have is something they want to know about. The real questions come later.
The reason Henry Ford paid his people better was so that they would have the money to buy his cars, thus increasing sales, thus higher value. That was his argument and it's why the lawsuit was defeated in the first place.