They do have reasons to be pissed at the entire rest of the world though...we've basically been screwing them over for decades.
Who was the first to nuclearize Korea? Not NK -- Eisenhower in the 50s. We planted a bunch of nukes right on the border, and were flying fighter jets armed with _nothing but_ nuclear bombs, and driving 20 kiloton nukes around in jeeps and helicopers just south of the DMZ -- and official policy was that if they attacked, we'd denoate all of 'em rather than let the North Koreans take them. Now, I know what you're saying -- that was the 50s...but that's just when it started. We kept it up until 1991, when we decided to withdraw the nukes to submarines and aircraft carriers and such just offshore. We've had them under constant threat of nuclear attack for sixty years!
The United Nations is still officially at war with North Korea.
It is said that North Korea has violated the 1953 armistice 221 times (many of which they dispute) -- but nobody counts how many times our side has. At the very least, the armistice prohibits nuclear weapons in the Korean theater -- so we've been violating it non-stop for around sixty years.
We say North Korea is developing nuclear weapons in violation of the Nonproliferation treaty. But one of the conditions of that treaty was that we would assist them in building nuclear power plants. Russia agreed to do this in the 80s, but never did. The USA then agreed to build them four LWRs in the 90s in exchange for more IAEA inspections. We got the inspections, but they never got the reactors. Never even made an attempt to start building them. Instead, we announced after the collapse of the USSR that we were taking our ICBMs formerly aimed at Russia and pointing them at North Korea. Bush and Obama have since also publicly stated that we are keeping our nuclear arsenal aimed at North Korea.
We've been threatening to nuke them for 60 years; and now we're shocked when they do the same thing? We've broken every damn promise we ever gave them, all with a loaded gun aimed at their head...is it REALLY a surprise they're not our best fucking friends?
The code that results from this must be open. It looks like you can profit from it the same way you can profit from other open source software -- either using it (if Brother made their printer drivers open source; or an engineering firm released open source CAD software), or selling support for it. Same conditions as the GPL.
And yea, they're almost certainly doing it because it's not worth fighting, and they're making that position public. That's nice. It probably cost them something to make this statement, vs not costing a dime to just ignore anyone who does this. Maybe this gives them some legal benefits regarding trademark dilution type stuff, I don't really know if anything like that applies to patents. And it gives them PR benefits. And it probably benefits them because they can then take that code and know it will have efficient algorithms that they can use -- as long as they're the only ones doing it, then they make open source code better and they can freely take that better code and use it however they want. But it's good for us too, because we can use that same open source code, and we can use their patents when writing that code.
Is it 100% altrustic? No. Neither is what Torvalds or Stallman does. There's no such thing. Is it going to be good for the open source community as a whole though? Probably. It's not perfect, but it's still a step forward for the open source community.
Or to translate from flamebait to English: They'll share with anyone else who shares. Same concept as the GPL, though admittedly in a somewhat more vague and less legally-binding manner.
My strategy: Use the Better Business Bureau. Works wonders. Although I've only had to do that once.
I got mis-billed by Verizon for my FiOS service. Or more accurately, the sales rep told me the wrong price -- more than once -- when I signed up. So I call up their customer service when I get my first bill, tell them it's more than what I was quoted. They say they don't know how that happened, credit my bill for the month, and say they'll put in a ticket. Next month's bill has the same problem. I call back and this time they say that's the correct price and there's nothing they can do about it and there's nobody higher up they can transfer me to. So, rather than sit there arguing I just said thank you, hung up, and immediately went online and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. A week later I get a call from someone at Verizon who tells me that their system won't let them lower my bill, but they can credit my account for the sum total of the price difference over my entire two year contract. So I got about two months of free service, and didn't spend more than an hour on the phone between all three calls.
I think you could probably manage Arch. It is more work sometimes to upgrade and to keep things running, but the forums are great and the documentation is excellent. As long as you know basically what the various packages you'll be using are (know what X.org is, know what KDE is -- not details even, just the names and that you need them) you should be good. They've got a wiki; read through the instructions for how to install it and see if you know what it's talking about. Very stable too. I switched about a year ago from Mandriva and absolutely love it.
Mandriva is a great distro too, much easier to get installed and I've always found it to be a bit more stable than Ubuntu. I think it may be dying though, looks like the last release was a while ago...
Meh....textbooks are expensive as hell, but only if you actually buy them. By junior year I'd realized that I had never once opened the textbook for any if my comp sci class and stopped buying them. It's just faster to Google what you need, and if they assign homework from the book (which I found very rare in CS,) you just go to the library.
What would be awesome is an open replacement for that damn $500 calculus textbook....math textbooks are one that you generally do actually need, and those prices are beyond absurd...
I'm sure you're right, but I think it's worth noting that this probably isn't much more expensive to deliver than FiOS or something. At a certain point the speed doesn't matter. It's the same thing they did with Gmail when that was first released.
First of all, when it's such a limited rollout, you can massively oversubscribe. I have FiOS with a 50mb package and I can barely saturate THAT, at 0.5% of these speeds. No web servers can deliver at that speed -- not even the major streaming sites like Netflix or YouTube. The only time I see my connection near full utilization is if I'm downloading a torrent with a ton of seeds. Unless you're keeping the traffic within the network, you'll never even hit a tenth of that 1 Gbps.
Now add in the fact that they have no legacy equipment. For Verizon, AT&T, etc, they've got that gear they got ten or twenty years ago that they're still trying to squeeze every last cent out of. And why not? With no competition, you'd have to be a moron not to. Google doesn't have that option, so they're going to have far better equipment, and just plan to recoup the cost later.
Yes, they should have found this earlier. On the other hand, Microsoft making stupid mistakes like that is quite different, as they never advertised Windows as an experimental operating system the way the bitcoin site describes it as an experiment in digital currency. I'm also a bit more forgiving because it seems like it's not really their code that had the bug that caused this, but rather someone else's database engine.
And yea, the bug isn't in the crypto, but understanding the implications of it requires some level of understanding of the crypto. And to be clear, I'm certainly not saying I'm an expert in this stuff in any way, just that I know enough to understand what the summary is talking about. The same way I'd say I generally understand how Tor works despite having never seen a single line of code from it. I know the basic concepts, and for reading a news article I figure that's good enough. I was pretty heavily into the Freenet project in highschool and contributed small bits of code to some related projects, so that's where my knowledge of this stuff comes from. Different goals, but the principles are similar enough.
If someone looks up patent information for an experimental drug, produces sine themselves and starts taking it, does that mean the drug is no longer experimental? The fact that people misuse it doesn't change what it is.
And not all experiments are scientifically rigorous. They are collecting data -- like this exact incident. And I bet they'll be looking at steps that could be taken to prevent this sort of thing in the future. The hypothesis is that client X with these features is sufficient to create a secure, anonymous digital currency. The results so far have always been "no it's not, because...." at which point they take those results, refine the client, and try again.
Major banks don't claim to be experiments. Finding problems like this is bitcoin's exact stated purpose right now. Granted, this does seem like something they should have been able to see coming, but at the same time, anyone who had any significant losses from this that they weren't expecting is just an idiot. You don't sink a ton of money into something that explicitly describes itself as an experiment without anticipating that you may lose it. That seems like common sense...
Their website explicitly states, right in the first sentence, that bitcoin is an experiment. Anyone who actually uses it as though it is a stable, secure currency is an illiterate moron.
The security was never broken and does not rely on the database specifics. Compatibility was broken. Security was not.
A better analogy would be like having a system that uses SHA-1 to hash passwords using a hardware chip....then they make a new version whose chip only does SHA-512. Everything is still as secure as it was, but you would no longer be able to transfer the output between devices.
It's not even 1.0; they're very clear that it is still _experimental_; and the only reason there was a problem was because people weren't bothering to update their clients.
In other words, if people run an outdated version of still alpha/beta-stage software as though it is production-ready...well, who's fault is that _really_?
It's not a currency; it's not advertised as a currency; it's an experiment in how to create a currency.
I generally avoid bitcoin news, but if you have any knowledge of distributed crypto the summary here makes perfect sense. I got it and I haven't touched any of that sort of stuff since highschool.
Of course not everyone is familiar with every field, but this is Slashdot not the New York Times. I think the assumption is and should be that if you care you either already have some very basic knowledge of the field or can do your own research -- which I see you did, and I thank you for posting the link for others -- but I don't think it's the editor's job to make sure every article is explained so well it could be understood by a liberal arts major. I thought they actually did a damn good job on this one.
Also, remember that it's a one paragraph summary. They don't have room to explain everything.
The very first words on their website state quite clearly that Bitcoin is an _experimental_ currency. If people choose to use it as more than that, that's their fault. Finding issues like this is exactly what Bitcoin's current purpose is.
Well, as I said, war isn't the only choice...but legally we only have three valid options -- war, diplomacy, or leave them alone until they reach our shores. Dropping bombs on and murdering the citizens of another soverign nation without their consent _is an act of war_...so we've already chosen war, we've just decided that it looks better if we don't formally declare it, and we're strong enough that nobody fights back. But that is a decision that is neither moral nor legal.
Yea, all it takes is a call to the local news. That's why if you do a quick Google you'll find dozens of reports about class action lawsuits being filed over cities shortening the yellow light when installing traffic cameras....
If it was so easy to fix, people wouldn't be suing over this exact practice _all the time_!
I believe there have been court cases in the us in the past where cameras were installed and the yellow light was shortened at the same time so that even if you were driving within the speed limit it would be physically impossible to stop before the light turned red. You seem to be implying that all drivers should always assume this to be the case and drive 10mph even on a 55mph road just in case there's no yellow. That argument makes no sense.
They are operating within nations, it is those nations' responsibility to police them. If they can't and want our help, that's fine, we can do that. If they refuse to do anything about it, their citizens are engaged in acts of war and we have every right to declare war in response.
No. First of all, prior to Paul's filibuster, the official policy of the administration on killing us citizens on us soil was that it was perfectly legal and hypothetically possible. No further conditions on that. At least now they've narrowed it down to people engaged in "combat"...though we have no way of knowing how broadly that is defined, so in a practical sense it doesn't change much.
The real issue though is that Paul did not go far enough. Done strikes are just as unconstitutional in Pakistan as they would be in Minnesota. The Bill of Rights is not some list of privileges given to us by the government. It is a list of rights, inherent to all human beings, that the government may not violate. Doesn't matter if they're inside our outside of our borders, and it doesn't matter if they're citizens. If we haven't declared war, we're required to give the accused a trial. It's that simple. There's no declaration of war against Pakistan, for just one example, so we can't legally use drones there.
Many cops have access to at least some of these weapons while off-duty, and many if these crimes are committed off duty with government weapons. In most states (but not all, showing how seriously screwed we are) it is not yet illegal to defend yourself against an off-duty cop engaged in illegal activity.
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They do have reasons to be pissed at the entire rest of the world though...we've basically been screwing them over for decades.
Who was the first to nuclearize Korea? Not NK -- Eisenhower in the 50s. We planted a bunch of nukes right on the border, and were flying fighter jets armed with _nothing but_ nuclear bombs, and driving 20 kiloton nukes around in jeeps and helicopers just south of the DMZ -- and official policy was that if they attacked, we'd denoate all of 'em rather than let the North Koreans take them. Now, I know what you're saying -- that was the 50s...but that's just when it started. We kept it up until 1991, when we decided to withdraw the nukes to submarines and aircraft carriers and such just offshore. We've had them under constant threat of nuclear attack for sixty years!
The United Nations is still officially at war with North Korea.
It is said that North Korea has violated the 1953 armistice 221 times (many of which they dispute) -- but nobody counts how many times our side has. At the very least, the armistice prohibits nuclear weapons in the Korean theater -- so we've been violating it non-stop for around sixty years.
We say North Korea is developing nuclear weapons in violation of the Nonproliferation treaty. But one of the conditions of that treaty was that we would assist them in building nuclear power plants. Russia agreed to do this in the 80s, but never did. The USA then agreed to build them four LWRs in the 90s in exchange for more IAEA inspections. We got the inspections, but they never got the reactors. Never even made an attempt to start building them. Instead, we announced after the collapse of the USSR that we were taking our ICBMs formerly aimed at Russia and pointing them at North Korea. Bush and Obama have since also publicly stated that we are keeping our nuclear arsenal aimed at North Korea.
We've been threatening to nuke them for 60 years; and now we're shocked when they do the same thing? We've broken every damn promise we ever gave them, all with a loaded gun aimed at their head...is it REALLY a surprise they're not our best fucking friends?
The code that results from this must be open. It looks like you can profit from it the same way you can profit from other open source software -- either using it (if Brother made their printer drivers open source; or an engineering firm released open source CAD software), or selling support for it. Same conditions as the GPL.
And yea, they're almost certainly doing it because it's not worth fighting, and they're making that position public. That's nice. It probably cost them something to make this statement, vs not costing a dime to just ignore anyone who does this. Maybe this gives them some legal benefits regarding trademark dilution type stuff, I don't really know if anything like that applies to patents. And it gives them PR benefits. And it probably benefits them because they can then take that code and know it will have efficient algorithms that they can use -- as long as they're the only ones doing it, then they make open source code better and they can freely take that better code and use it however they want. But it's good for us too, because we can use that same open source code, and we can use their patents when writing that code.
Is it 100% altrustic? No. Neither is what Torvalds or Stallman does. There's no such thing. Is it going to be good for the open source community as a whole though? Probably. It's not perfect, but it's still a step forward for the open source community.
Or to translate from flamebait to English:
They'll share with anyone else who shares. Same concept as the GPL, though admittedly in a somewhat more vague and less legally-binding manner.
My strategy: Use the Better Business Bureau. Works wonders. Although I've only had to do that once.
I got mis-billed by Verizon for my FiOS service. Or more accurately, the sales rep told me the wrong price -- more than once -- when I signed up. So I call up their customer service when I get my first bill, tell them it's more than what I was quoted. They say they don't know how that happened, credit my bill for the month, and say they'll put in a ticket. Next month's bill has the same problem. I call back and this time they say that's the correct price and there's nothing they can do about it and there's nobody higher up they can transfer me to. So, rather than sit there arguing I just said thank you, hung up, and immediately went online and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. A week later I get a call from someone at Verizon who tells me that their system won't let them lower my bill, but they can credit my account for the sum total of the price difference over my entire two year contract. So I got about two months of free service, and didn't spend more than an hour on the phone between all three calls.
I think you could probably manage Arch. It is more work sometimes to upgrade and to keep things running, but the forums are great and the documentation is excellent. As long as you know basically what the various packages you'll be using are (know what X.org is, know what KDE is -- not details even, just the names and that you need them) you should be good. They've got a wiki; read through the instructions for how to install it and see if you know what it's talking about. Very stable too. I switched about a year ago from Mandriva and absolutely love it.
Mandriva is a great distro too, much easier to get installed and I've always found it to be a bit more stable than Ubuntu. I think it may be dying though, looks like the last release was a while ago...
Meh....textbooks are expensive as hell, but only if you actually buy them. By junior year I'd realized that I had never once opened the textbook for any if my comp sci class and stopped buying them. It's just faster to Google what you need, and if they assign homework from the book (which I found very rare in CS,) you just go to the library.
What would be awesome is an open replacement for that damn $500 calculus textbook....math textbooks are one that you generally do actually need, and those prices are beyond absurd...
Since when is "where" the plural firm of "was"?
Although I must say I didn't notice this error until it was pointed out...it's only one extra letter...
I'm sure you're right, but I think it's worth noting that this probably isn't much more expensive to deliver than FiOS or something. At a certain point the speed doesn't matter. It's the same thing they did with Gmail when that was first released.
First of all, when it's such a limited rollout, you can massively oversubscribe. I have FiOS with a 50mb package and I can barely saturate THAT, at 0.5% of these speeds. No web servers can deliver at that speed -- not even the major streaming sites like Netflix or YouTube. The only time I see my connection near full utilization is if I'm downloading a torrent with a ton of seeds. Unless you're keeping the traffic within the network, you'll never even hit a tenth of that 1 Gbps.
Now add in the fact that they have no legacy equipment. For Verizon, AT&T, etc, they've got that gear they got ten or twenty years ago that they're still trying to squeeze every last cent out of. And why not? With no competition, you'd have to be a moron not to. Google doesn't have that option, so they're going to have far better equipment, and just plan to recoup the cost later.
So, what, they don't have the technology to write a three line bash script and a cron job to run it every half hour?
Yes, they should have found this earlier. On the other hand, Microsoft making stupid mistakes like that is quite different, as they never advertised Windows as an experimental operating system the way the bitcoin site describes it as an experiment in digital currency. I'm also a bit more forgiving because it seems like it's not really their code that had the bug that caused this, but rather someone else's database engine.
And yea, the bug isn't in the crypto, but understanding the implications of it requires some level of understanding of the crypto. And to be clear, I'm certainly not saying I'm an expert in this stuff in any way, just that I know enough to understand what the summary is talking about. The same way I'd say I generally understand how Tor works despite having never seen a single line of code from it. I know the basic concepts, and for reading a news article I figure that's good enough. I was pretty heavily into the Freenet project in highschool and contributed small bits of code to some related projects, so that's where my knowledge of this stuff comes from. Different goals, but the principles are similar enough.
If someone looks up patent information for an experimental drug, produces sine themselves and starts taking it, does that mean the drug is no longer experimental? The fact that people misuse it doesn't change what it is.
And not all experiments are scientifically rigorous. They are collecting data -- like this exact incident. And I bet they'll be looking at steps that could be taken to prevent this sort of thing in the future. The hypothesis is that client X with these features is sufficient to create a secure, anonymous digital currency. The results so far have always been "no it's not, because...." at which point they take those results, refine the client, and try again.
Major banks don't claim to be experiments. Finding problems like this is bitcoin's exact stated purpose right now. Granted, this does seem like something they should have been able to see coming, but at the same time, anyone who had any significant losses from this that they weren't expecting is just an idiot. You don't sink a ton of money into something that explicitly describes itself as an experiment without anticipating that you may lose it. That seems like common sense...
Their website explicitly states, right in the first sentence, that bitcoin is an experiment. Anyone who actually uses it as though it is a stable, secure currency is an illiterate moron.
It means it almost became multiple distinct currencies. Think about what happened when they created the euro...but in reverse.
The security was never broken and does not rely on the database specifics. Compatibility was broken. Security was not.
A better analogy would be like having a system that uses SHA-1 to hash passwords using a hardware chip....then they make a new version whose chip only does SHA-512. Everything is still as secure as it was, but you would no longer be able to transfer the output between devices.
...so they should have released an upgrade to solve a problem caused by people not upgrading?
It's not even 1.0; they're very clear that it is still _experimental_; and the only reason there was a problem was because people weren't bothering to update their clients.
In other words, if people run an outdated version of still alpha/beta-stage software as though it is production-ready...well, who's fault is that _really_?
It's not a currency; it's not advertised as a currency; it's an experiment in how to create a currency.
I generally avoid bitcoin news, but if you have any knowledge of distributed crypto the summary here makes perfect sense. I got it and I haven't touched any of that sort of stuff since highschool.
Of course not everyone is familiar with every field, but this is Slashdot not the New York Times. I think the assumption is and should be that if you care you either already have some very basic knowledge of the field or can do your own research -- which I see you did, and I thank you for posting the link for others -- but I don't think it's the editor's job to make sure every article is explained so well it could be understood by a liberal arts major. I thought they actually did a damn good job on this one.
Also, remember that it's a one paragraph summary. They don't have room to explain everything.
The very first words on their website state quite clearly that Bitcoin is an _experimental_ currency. If people choose to use it as more than that, that's their fault. Finding issues like this is exactly what Bitcoin's current purpose is.
Well, as I said, war isn't the only choice...but legally we only have three valid options -- war, diplomacy, or leave them alone until they reach our shores. Dropping bombs on and murdering the citizens of another soverign nation without their consent _is an act of war_...so we've already chosen war, we've just decided that it looks better if we don't formally declare it, and we're strong enough that nobody fights back. But that is a decision that is neither moral nor legal.
Yea, all it takes is a call to the local news. That's why if you do a quick Google you'll find dozens of reports about class action lawsuits being filed over cities shortening the yellow light when installing traffic cameras....
If it was so easy to fix, people wouldn't be suing over this exact practice _all the time_!
I believe there have been court cases in the us in the past where cameras were installed and the yellow light was shortened at the same time so that even if you were driving within the speed limit it would be physically impossible to stop before the light turned red. You seem to be implying that all drivers should always assume this to be the case and drive 10mph even on a 55mph road just in case there's no yellow. That argument makes no sense.
They are operating within nations, it is those nations' responsibility to police them. If they can't and want our help, that's fine, we can do that. If they refuse to do anything about it, their citizens are engaged in acts of war and we have every right to declare war in response.
No. First of all, prior to Paul's filibuster, the official policy of the administration on killing us citizens on us soil was that it was perfectly legal and hypothetically possible. No further conditions on that. At least now they've narrowed it down to people engaged in "combat"...though we have no way of knowing how broadly that is defined, so in a practical sense it doesn't change much.
The real issue though is that Paul did not go far enough. Done strikes are just as unconstitutional in Pakistan as they would be in Minnesota. The Bill of Rights is not some list of privileges given to us by the government. It is a list of rights, inherent to all human beings, that the government may not violate. Doesn't matter if they're inside our outside of our borders, and it doesn't matter if they're citizens. If we haven't declared war, we're required to give the accused a trial. It's that simple. There's no declaration of war against Pakistan, for just one example, so we can't legally use drones there.
Many cops have access to at least some of these weapons while off-duty, and many if these crimes are committed off duty with government weapons. In most states (but not all, showing how seriously screwed we are) it is not yet illegal to defend yourself against an off-duty cop engaged in illegal activity.