I am no cryptocurrency expert, but my understanding is that the BTC really only has value because the BTC user base has formed a consensus that it does. I believe the vast majority of conscience human beings can agree that North Korea's (government's) recent actions and stance are dangerous and morally reprehensible.
Assuming that NK has channeled most of its BTC stash through a small number of wallets, and that most of them may be identified by NK's spending patterns, I think this is a good case for implementing "poisoned wallets" to render all BTC (or partial BTC) that left a verboten wallet after a given time stamp. This would work, of course, only for users that use the blacklist enabled version of the software... but I believe enough people find NK's position sufficiently dangerous to warrant adopting this alternative code base to at least GREATLY DEVALUE these "tainted" BTC. This type of change begs two interesting questions:
1) How are the list of poisoned wallets managed? On the micro level, I believe the choice of banned wallets should be up to the individual BTC user, but most users won't want to manage such a tedious list. I expect users would want to defer this responsibility to one or more "accusation bodies" each with their own accusation, conviction, poisoning and appeal processes, all blockchain protected (outside the BTC blockchain)... I expect users would sign up for these poisoning feeds in one of two groups: 1) organizations that uphold the users moral convictions, or 2) organizations that seek out a superset of poisoned wallets, for those that want to ensure any BTC they receive are untainted, and good for other transactions. I believe most users would be most interested in aggregators (#2), but enough users would also add original accusers (#1) to make such a system plausable.
2) Tainted BTCs wouldn't be completely valueless, as some users may still accept them, so differently tainted BTCs would trade at their own distinct prices, which may be an interesting opportunity for cryptocurrency exchange companies.
Several are commenting on if this makes Walmart a monopoly (or some permutation thereof)... and we're talking about the same laws that govern anti-trust violations and monopolies... but to me this sounds more like anti-trust style collusion. Multiple companies (Walmart and their suppliers) with some common interests organizing to give preferential or (in this case) discriminatory treatment to one or a small group of companies or individuals. Amazon is not hurting for customers, but this is hard to see as anything but a move to damage their customer base.
Not throwing any pitty-parties... just what it looks like to me.
I have yet to hear the kid's explanation. I'm not giving him a free pass, but after just reading the post on how and why science reporting is so bad. We know he was questioned and detained for what turned out to be a commercial clock board in a pencil box (or something similar.) There are more innocuous explanations. He could have, for instance, gotten a discarded, damaged circuit board working, and put it pencil box for lack of any other available, undamaged enclosure. I'm not proposing this because I think the kid is blameless in the circumstances or their aftermath... but primarily to point out that there are other explanations.
Sounds like they're playing right into the hands of the patent trolls... The whole point seems to be to hope someone accidentally infringes so they can go after them later. I thought the goal of the patent system was to foster innovation. How does this do anything but impede it?
An unnamed representative from another firm contacted by Mr. Digati said later, "We would have turned him in ourselves, but his threat got caught in our spam filter.";-) lol
Millions of people download "The XYZ Picture" and see it for free without paying you a dime
Most of these millions of people wouldn't have paid to see in the first place. Lets say a few thousand that would have paid to see your picture don't because they found it for free yes, this costs you real money
Some of these millions decide to see it in theaters for various reasons:
it's more fun to go see it in a large groups with their friends
The prefer a big theater viewing experience
or maybe they just like the over-buttered movie theater popcorn
and many of these people wouldn't have even known about your movie unless they found it online for free This is money you got from movie piracy that you wouldn't have gotten if it couldn't be downloaded
many of these millions tell the friends about it, and they go to the theater to see your movie. again more money you got from free movie piracy as advertising
Many of these millions decide that your movie isn't good enough, or worth the time / effort to go see in theaters, but they really liked it or want to see all your behind the scenes stuff, so they decide to buy or rent the movie on DVD when it comes out These are even MORE sales you can attribute to free movie piracy as advertising
And here is the very delicate and sensitive philosophical question
Do the few thousand movie tickets you lost in sales to piracy cost you more than...
...the many thousand more tickets you sold because of the free advertising that movie piracy provided?
I honestly think this comes down to those movie makers who make really mediocre films being afraid that they'll loose their shirts to those movie makers that produce quality content that thrives on word of mouth advertising.
They requested suggestions... so I'm sending them this...
I recently became aware of your challenge, and I think it's a great idea. I applaud your initiative to dispell disinformation. I have to admit that, as it stands, I don't think your challenge will have any takers for three reasons:
1) Money... While I understand that many people make great contributions to our society for little or no compensation I think, in light of what your asking, your proposed reward is much to meager; and I say that not simply in deference to greed. I realize this is a competition you are financing out of your own pocket, and you have limited ability to fund it, but the feat you are asking may take hundreds of hours of research, understanding and custom analog circuit design, specific to at least that particular model of hard drive, if not the specific revision, or even that PARTICULAR individual item (compensating for the timing and balance characteristics of that particular unit). If this feat *WAS* accomplished it's important to realize that it would have almost no marketable value to owners of other drives. Hundreds of hours of engineering is hardly compensated for by $40, a used hard drive, and a little ego-boo... There may be some that say that if this can't be done for $100, it's not worth doing. but if the data on the drives was millions of sensitive credit card records, or resellable sensitive medical records of either celebrities (to the paparazzi) or of more mundane consumers (to medical insurance companies), or sensitive goverment secrets, the recovery of data off a single hard drive could easily be worth millions, or in some cases peoples lives.
2) Specialization... Like I said, as I understand data recovery of OVERWRITTEN data, it's an analog matter of figuring the old values as some percentage of the current data values. This is a very specialized process probably best accomplished by the engineers who created the original drives... furthermore, it's not in THIER employers' best interest to see this myth debunked, as it prevents the market being flooded with cheap retired enterprise-quality hard drives.
3) Limitations... I am quite convinced that this challenge cannot be accomplished without at least replacing the HD's logic board, as the process requires direct access to the raw analog induction data comming directly off the disk. Also more than 3 days may be required to determine the specific physical characteristics of balance, timing and geometry of the specific unit you are providing. While you waive this stipulation for professional recovery houses, for the common hobbyist you are essentially tying their hands and removing any chance for them to compete. I realize that the internals of a hard drive are very sensitive, I think all participants should be at least allowed to replace the drive's logic board and have a few week shot at the device.
I personally have very little vested interest in this competion. While knowing if this feat can be accomplished, and having the particulars more readily availible, might be beneficial, at least professionally. I have very little circut design experience and can barely immagine designing something myself, much more complex than a toaster. I hope my suggestions will help this challenge become more valuable simply than determining that nobody felt willing to tackel this type of challenge for a C-note and a little noteriety.
I believe that the BSD license was revised since then to exclude this side effect.
Touch Screen not mentioned in spec?
on
YOPY Arrives
·
· Score: 1
I was really disappointed to not see a touch screen mentioned in the spec. I did eventually found out it came with a stylus which practically implies it has a touch screen, but I found this very confusing. I, of course, think a PDA without a touch screen is rather useless.
I've had this idea for some time, and haven't had the time to put it into practice. This is mainly targeted at television (and possibly radio), but could have some effect on any advertiser-supported media. (I had intended on using this against MSNBC, in hopes that MicroSoft would divest itself of NBC... Turns out I never watch NBC anyway.) I'm also not sure how well this would work with something as ubiquitous as the RIAA or MPAA although I think it will work well at something small and targeted.
The idea is basically this: Watch the media of those whom you want their practices to change, and pay careful attention to the advertisers. Send nasty-grams to each of the advertisers you noticed along the lines of:
Dear Sirs:
I noticed your advertisement on channel+network while watching program. This program is (produced/supported/aired) by company name which is involved in types of unsavory activities. By observing your advertisements on this channel, I see that your company supports such activities. I have, therefore, decided to stop buying your product name until you stop advertising on this station, or until the station stops doing unsavory things. Thank you for letting me bring this to your attention.
Sincerely,
Your Name
* Please replace italics with specific details.
And of course sticking to your guns and not buying the products will probably help too.
I feel this may be the type of message that will probably get through to television stations, at least, and perhaps the MPAA/RIAA.
Yawn... Another closed source project with a cool name... Who cares.
What is really sad is that this used to be a GPLed Open Source project.
I'm a wee bit surprised RMS isn't all over them for continuing to call their project "free software"... (I believe the quote was: "Moonlight|3D is a free software modeller and renderer...")
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but "back in the day" they wrote some (at least one) pretty darn good books. It's easy to scoff at the title of this book, but Writing Solid Code: Microsoft's Techniques for Developing Bug-Free C Programs by Steve Maguire is probably the best book I've read (ok... I only read about half of it yet) on bullet proofing your development process. The book is a bit focused on C, but most of it's techniques can be adapted in C++ or any other programming language.
Anyone who comments on how bad this book is (because it's written by Microsoft) that hasn't at least flipped through it: YOU ARE A TROLL!
I think the reason this assumtion may appear so alluring is that, in mathematics anyway, it is often easiest to prove the the most challenging theoryms by proving that assuming the theorym is not true leads to a contradiction. I think it is only natural to try the same mental gymnastics in science. I do not believe that such endevours will bear fruit, however, because I (personally) believe that G-d does not wish to be "proven" to exist in such a definitive manner.
Did anyone notice that the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop is a NON-WORKING mod... Not only is it a DOA laptop before the ambitious girls got started, but the "mouse" is a yo-yo attached with a plastic-bead necklace to the computer...
I don't see how this counts as a "case-mod"... Maybe "doorstop-mod", but that's about it...
P.S. Yes, I realize that my comment on such things is proof that I was bored enough to actually read through the better part of the PHKL page...:(
Just to clarify, This appears to be from your House Represetative (who will have to vote on this if it passes the Senate), but the people currently debating the bill are your Senators. For Washington State these would be:
I think the intent is that they have a new compressed audio format (which the average consumer can't tell from MP3) that is "secure" (such as SDMI), which can be cleared to work on a small list of devices (that the end-user owns) after the user proves that they own the CD... So, they'd need to release updates for the MP3 players to give them GUIDs (or something similar) and SDMI decoder capibilities...
...what they probably meant to say "They are about one to ten millimeters in size, which makes them magnitudes smaller than the width of a human-hare."
Slashdot Mirror
I am no cryptocurrency expert, but my understanding is that the BTC really only has value because the BTC user base has formed a consensus that it does. I believe the vast majority of conscience human beings can agree that North Korea's (government's) recent actions and stance are dangerous and morally reprehensible.
Assuming that NK has channeled most of its BTC stash through a small number of wallets, and that most of them may be identified by NK's spending patterns, I think this is a good case for implementing "poisoned wallets" to render all BTC (or partial BTC) that left a verboten wallet after a given time stamp. This would work, of course, only for users that use the blacklist enabled version of the software... but I believe enough people find NK's position sufficiently dangerous to warrant adopting this alternative code base to at least GREATLY DEVALUE these "tainted" BTC. This type of change begs two interesting questions:
1) How are the list of poisoned wallets managed? On the micro level, I believe the choice of banned wallets should be up to the individual BTC user, but most users won't want to manage such a tedious list. I expect users would want to defer this responsibility to one or more "accusation bodies" each with their own accusation, conviction, poisoning and appeal processes, all blockchain protected (outside the BTC blockchain)... I expect users would sign up for these poisoning feeds in one of two groups: 1) organizations that uphold the users moral convictions, or 2) organizations that seek out a superset of poisoned wallets, for those that want to ensure any BTC they receive are untainted, and good for other transactions. I believe most users would be most interested in aggregators (#2), but enough users would also add original accusers (#1) to make such a system plausable.
2) Tainted BTCs wouldn't be completely valueless, as some users may still accept them, so differently tainted BTCs would trade at their own distinct prices, which may be an interesting opportunity for cryptocurrency exchange companies.
What do you think?
Several are commenting on if this makes Walmart a monopoly (or some permutation thereof)... and we're talking about the same laws that govern anti-trust violations and monopolies... but to me this sounds more like anti-trust style collusion. Multiple companies (Walmart and their suppliers) with some common interests organizing to give preferential or (in this case) discriminatory treatment to one or a small group of companies or individuals. Amazon is not hurting for customers, but this is hard to see as anything but a move to damage their customer base.
Not throwing any pitty-parties... just what it looks like to me.
If you look at the patent, it's to deposit a substance to a semiconductor wafer with photolithography for IC fabrication.
http://www.macrumors.com/2017/...
I have yet to hear the kid's explanation. I'm not giving him a free pass, but after just reading the post on how and why science reporting is so bad. We know he was questioned and detained for what turned out to be a commercial clock board in a pencil box (or something similar.) There are more innocuous explanations. He could have, for instance, gotten a discarded, damaged circuit board working, and put it pencil box for lack of any other available, undamaged enclosure. I'm not proposing this because I think the kid is blameless in the circumstances or their aftermath... but primarily to point out that there are other explanations.
Sounds like they're playing right into the hands of the patent trolls... The whole point seems to be to hope someone accidentally infringes so they can go after them later. I thought the goal of the patent system was to foster innovation. How does this do anything but impede it?
An unnamed representative from another firm contacted by Mr. Digati said later, "We would have turned him in ourselves, but his threat got caught in our spam filter." ;-) lol
Some interesting points to think about:
and many of these people wouldn't have even known about your movie unless they found it online for free This is money you got from movie piracy that you wouldn't have gotten if it couldn't be downloaded
And here is the very delicate and sensitive philosophical question
I honestly think this comes down to those movie makers who make really mediocre films being afraid that they'll loose their shirts to those movie makers that produce quality content that thrives on word of mouth advertising.
What do you think?
Hmm... This is the initial announcement I found from Sept 24, 2002... Back before the project was renamed Firebird, then FireFox
Enjoy: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/24/1215252
They requested suggestions... so I'm sending them this...
I recently became aware of your challenge, and I think it's a great idea. I applaud your initiative to dispell disinformation. I have to admit that, as it stands, I don't think your challenge will have any takers for three reasons:
1) Money... While I understand that many people make great contributions to our society for little or no compensation I think, in light of what your asking, your proposed reward is much to meager; and I say that not simply in deference to greed. I realize this is a competition you are financing out of your own pocket, and you have limited ability to fund it, but the feat you are asking may take hundreds of hours of research, understanding and custom analog circuit design, specific to at least that particular model of hard drive, if not the specific revision, or even that PARTICULAR individual item (compensating for the timing and balance characteristics of that particular unit). If this feat *WAS* accomplished it's important to realize that it would have almost no marketable value to owners of other drives. Hundreds of hours of engineering is hardly compensated for by $40, a used hard drive, and a little ego-boo...
There may be some that say that if this can't be done for $100, it's not worth doing. but if the data on the drives was millions of sensitive credit card records, or resellable sensitive medical records of either celebrities (to the paparazzi) or of more mundane consumers (to medical insurance companies), or sensitive goverment secrets, the recovery of data off a single hard drive could easily be worth millions, or in some cases peoples lives.
2) Specialization... Like I said, as I understand data recovery of OVERWRITTEN data, it's an analog matter of figuring the old values as some percentage of the current data values. This is a very specialized process probably best accomplished by the engineers who created the original drives... furthermore, it's not in THIER employers' best interest to see this myth debunked, as it prevents the market being flooded with cheap retired enterprise-quality hard drives.
3) Limitations... I am quite convinced that this challenge cannot be accomplished without at least replacing the HD's logic board, as the process requires direct access to the raw analog induction data comming directly off the disk. Also more than 3 days may be required to determine the specific physical characteristics of balance, timing and geometry of the specific unit you are providing. While you waive this stipulation for professional recovery houses, for the common hobbyist you are essentially tying their hands and removing any chance for them to compete. I realize that the internals of a hard drive are very sensitive, I think all participants should be at least allowed to replace the drive's logic board and have a few week shot at the device.
I personally have very little vested interest in this competion. While knowing if this feat can be accomplished, and having the particulars more readily availible, might be beneficial, at least professionally. I have very little circut design experience and can barely immagine designing something myself, much more complex than a toaster. I hope my suggestions will help this challenge become more valuable simply than determining that nobody felt willing to tackel this type of challenge for a C-note and a little noteriety.
I applaud your efforts,
-Loren Osborn
Software Engineer
Quoted from the article "I have no skills and no ability..." Yep, sounds like Microsoft to me.
Umm... I'm surprised nobody did this in the shell.. I saw lots of perl, but no bash... Here's what I used:
0 00111000001100101011001000010000 00010000001010100011011 10100011101101 10111 0010110110000100000010001100110111101 1000111001100100000010001001 1000010000001100000 0010110110 1 100110010000001110100011010000111 000000110110001101111011 000000111001101 00001" | tr -d ' \012' | sed -e 's/\([01][01][01][01][01][01][01][01]\)/\1,/g' | tr ',' '\012') | bc | sed -e 's/^/\\\\0/' | sed -e 's/0\([0123][01234567][01234567]\)/\1/g'| tr -d '\012' ; echo) | xargs echo -e
( (echo obase=8 ; echo ibase=2 ; echo "010010010010000001110011011010000110111
1011100
0001100001011101
0000110100101101110011010
0101011001010110101100100000011011
011100010000001000001011100000111001001
10
11011110110
01100001011110010010
10110111001100100001000000110
00011011000010000001001001001000000110
111011011110111010000100000011101110110
000101
010010111001100
110101011100110111100100
110100001101001011100100111010000
Notice the year:
I believe that the BSD license was revised since then to exclude this side effect.
I was really disappointed to not see a touch screen mentioned in the spec. I did eventually found out it came with a stylus which practically implies it has a touch screen, but I found this very confusing. I, of course, think a PDA without a touch screen is rather useless.
The idea is basically this: Watch the media of those whom you want their practices to change, and pay careful attention to the advertisers. Send nasty-grams to each of the advertisers you noticed along the lines of:
And of course sticking to your guns and not buying the products will probably help too.I feel this may be the type of message that will probably get through to television stations, at least, and perhaps the MPAA/RIAA.
Best regards,
What is really sad is that this used to be a GPLed Open Source project.
I'm a wee bit surprised RMS isn't all over them for continuing to call their project "free software"... (I believe the quote was: "Moonlight|3D is a free software modeller and renderer...")
by Steve Maguire is probably the best book I've read (ok... I only read about half of it yet) on bullet proofing your development process. The book is a bit focused on C, but most of it's techniques can be adapted in C++ or any other programming language.
Anyone who comments on how bad this book is (because it's written by Microsoft) that hasn't at least flipped through it: YOU ARE A TROLL!
Hope that this helps.
What the heck is QT?
I think the reason this assumtion may appear so alluring is that, in mathematics anyway, it is often easiest to prove the the most challenging theoryms by proving that assuming the theorym is not true leads to a contradiction. I think it is only natural to try the same mental gymnastics in science. I do not believe that such endevours will bear fruit, however, because I (personally) believe that G-d does not wish to be "proven" to exist in such a definitive manner.
Did anyone notice that the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop is a NON-WORKING mod... Not only is it a DOA laptop before the ambitious girls got started, but the "mouse" is a yo-yo attached with a plastic-bead necklace to the computer...
:(
I don't see how this counts as a "case-mod"... Maybe "doorstop-mod", but that's about it...
P.S. Yes, I realize that my comment on such things is proof that I was bored enough to actually read through the better part of the PHKL page...
darn slashdot...
Would you prefer a sed binding for SDL?
;)
(I probably shouldn't give him any ideas... )
I think the intent is that they have a new compressed audio format (which the average consumer can't tell from MP3) that is "secure" (such as SDMI), which can be cleared to work on a small list of devices (that the end-user owns) after the user proves that they own the CD... So, they'd need to release updates for the MP3 players to give them GUIDs (or something similar) and SDMI decoder capibilities...
..."Security by obscurity" wins again...
NOT!
;-)