PaperclipTaken's comments

I definately disagree with the idea that adding private security won't remove funding from public security. If the vasy majority of wealthy townships start funding their own private security, it will be much harder to justify expensive policing budgets, and potentially even cheap police budgets.

Short term there are only upsides, but in the long run this will weaken the local governments.

This might actually be a better way to advertise on the internet. My biggest qualm with advertising is that in almost every case, the product being shoved into your face is not the best product for you needs, it's the product with the better marketing plan, which has little correlation to the actual value of the product.

With endorsements, it's more likely that I'll get advertised products that suit my needs, because I'll get more advertised products that people who are similar to me have endorsed.

It still doesn't remove the marketing budget factor, but it may more strongly correlate the things that are advertised to me with the things that best fit my needs.

Similar to the other comments, this seems virtually unrelated to the actual arrest. This article makes it seem as though the single mistake is what allowed DPR to get nabbed, and yet there is a lot more going on in the investigation.

It was a boneheaded mistake but it's not what got him arrested.

I'm always cautious around claims of ADHD. My experiences have been that attention span works largely like muscle. If you practice focus and force yourself to get better at it, you notice improvements over time.

It has also been my observation that you can grow a tolerance to and dependence on ADHD medicine.

I support the author's goal of finding some other solution that motivates him to practice his focus.

"A common misconception is that transactional confidence is based on time"

Transactional confidence is based on the probability of someone compromising the network for enough blocks to undo a spend that you've already honored (IE you gave them what they paid for, then they undo the transaction). At 6 blocks, you are assuming that an attacker won't have the computational power to reverse 6 blocks in a row.

When blocks come out every 2 hours, that means you need to find every single block for 12 hours, or essentially control the blockchain for a long time.

When the block rate is down at 5 minutes, you only need to control the network for 30 minutes - you have more chances to get lucky and undo 6 transactions in a row in your 12 hours of purchased computing time.

A halved block rate does not mean you need less computational power, but it does mean that computational power is probably cheaper and 6 blocks worth of power is going to be more affordable.

I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera. Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.

Not to say that we shouldn't move forward with hyperloop, or at least build a proof-of-concept somewhere. At the proposed price for hyperloop, you could replace all existing Amtrak transportation in America with a hyperloop and still pay about the same amount for a ticket.

To me, that's worth investing in.

The social networks of the future will have the potential to access all of your daily interactions via your smartphone. They have the potential to know who you call, who you meet with, and where you hang out.

This enables your social network app to keep up with your relationships, without you needing to tell it that X is now just an acquaintance and Y is suddenly an important person in your life. In fact, your app might figure those changes out before you do.

Even under the threat of panopticon, these advancements are attractive.

This paper offers little with regards to future steps to protect your data, and basically accepts that we must give all of our information to corporations, and protect ourselves by improving our government.

But future technological advancements can help us escape giving our data to corporations. Imagine using a bittorrent style service to back up your (encrypted) files instead of drop box. Imagine using freenet to back up your files. Imagine using bitcoin to replace credit cards. Imagine using a mesh-network to avoid centralized ISPs.

A lot of these technologies aren't practical yet, but are moving forward. Changing the govenrment will be a long, slow, painful process. While we are waiting on the bureaucracy, we can work to advance decentralized technologies that will help put privacy back in our own hands.

Anecdotal evidence is not scientific, but this makes a lot of sense in the context of my life. At work, when I hit a tough problem, I'm much more likely to tab over to HN or reddit, yet I've found that somehow I manage to hit the deadlines at the same pace regardless of how much I force myself to focus.

I do think though while you might be drawing from one 'pool', it's a pool that you can work to expand. To me this seems to be the same vein of psychology that makes ADHD medicine ineffective for kids on the long term. There's one pool of resources you are drawing from but like muscular strength you aren't doomed to your current limits.

OVH is still the cheapest host I've ever seen. 1 TB disk space, 100mbps connection speed, 5TB bandwidth, all for $20/mo?

I'm not complaining, nor have I seen better.

Heinlein's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice"

Maybe I have missed something, but other than being a 'search engine,' I'm not really told your site is supposed to be used. Is it good for finding courses? Is it good for finding explanations on a specific topic such as Random Forests?

It looks like a great tool but I don't really know what I'm supposed to be searching for.

Kind of. There were theories before bitcoin but for the most part each had some major obstical that they were unable to overcome. Bitcoin represents the first cryptocurrency that was truly successful.

Addition information about Ripple:

https://ripple.com/wiki/Main_Page

I'm still against using passwords at all. In today's society it's completely unavoidable but instead of expecting people to go through the trouble of maintaining a different password for every site we should be trying to move websites in the direction of using tools like public key authentication and two-factor authentication. The future of internet security will be better if we make life easier for the end user.

And while public key authentication may seem difficult to implement server-side by doing such a thing you will never risk a database password leak again.

There are a few challenges facing Bitcoin, and I think that in the long run Bitcoin will not be the chosen digital currency of the world.

The first problem is that there is a highly predictable and (at the moment) constant supply of bitcoins, which means that the value of the coin will adjust like a commodity as more or less people start to use it. It's like Gold or Oil in the sense that when people want it, it's worth a lot, and when people don't want it, it's not as expensive. That chains the value to the demand, meaning that any time you use bitcoin as a store-of-value, you are putting yourself at the complete mercy of the market.

Many advocates believe that as the number of people using bitcoin grows the price will stabilize, but I think that using bitcoin as a store-of-value is going to end up like using the gold standard, especially because some early adopters have tens of thousands to even a million (Satoshi is believed to have a million) bitcoins, and any of them could decide to 'cash out', which would dramatically change the supply and potentially affect the whole market.

Another problem is that the currency is highly traceable, and while you can do things to obfuscate your spending habits there are lots of techniques involving statistical analysis that shed doubt on the effectiveness of obfuscation. You can take this back to the "I have nothing to hide" argument, but there are plenty of powerful parties that will be more interested in a currency that can't be traced (imagine big business or big finance), and an untraceable currency would certainly be more attractive.

But to me the biggest current problem with bitcoin is the uncertainty. There are many conflicting schools of thought in economics each with their own reasons why bitcoin is good or bad. But beyond the basics, macroeconomics often involves a lot of voodoo, and for any new paradigm there will be major schools of thought that will believe the new paradigm is bad or unstable in some way. There is no real way to fight this except to accept that we ultimately have no idea how new economic paradigms will affect our world, and that some of the naysayers may be correct and thus caution should be used.

There is a solution that is easier than auditing, found within the public key system. You could use the same password for every single website without any of them ever knowing what it is. You would instead associate your account with a public key and then use it to verify your identity every time you wanted to log in.

Then, the only vulnerability is your local machine. If someone hacks a website, the only password related information they can access is your public key, but you tell that to everyone anyway. They won't be able to use that to log onto any other website, even though you use the same password for all of them.

You would still probably want to use multiple public keys, and two-factor authentication (to eliminate the single-point-of-failure risk), but the technology already exists for us to be doing this. It just needs that extra layer that will make using such a system easy for grandma, and then of course for websites to start accepting public key authentication instead of password authentication.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

This may seem cheap, but there are already many, many orders out there for ASIC, and all of the factories are backed up. Butterfly Labs only recently released models that have been on order for many months (I want to say greater than 6). If you put down $1.2 million, it could be months before you got your machines and by then you would no longer control 50% of the mining.

This dollar amount is also particularly low because ASIC technology is new - most people who have put money into ASICs aren't even mining yet. Once the technology is settled in, controlling the block chain will become more expensive.

Furthermore, the number of things that you can do while controlling the block chain is actually really limited. You still can't spend other people's money. You can prevent people from spending money, but you can't make them spend money. You can double spend yourself, but if the bitcoin community was aware that someone was manipulating the block chain, they would be much more careful about accepting transactions from new wallets, and would reject all transactions from a wallet they knew was controlled by the double spender.

Furthermore, if you did take control of the block chain I personally would dump a few thousand into miners myself, to help regain control of the system. I'm sure that I'm not alone, and the act of bitcoin users simply 'fighting back' may be enough to minimize your control of the market.

And finally, as other people have stated, you can always change the hashing algorithm. Most people use 1 bitcoin client. In fact, this client once had an update that caused an error and forked the block chain and allowed at least one person to double spend $10,000. In the event of a major crisis, there would most be enough bitcoin users willing to fork the block chain that you could indeed get a new hashing algorithm designed to be incompatible with the attackers hardware. The choice is between that and watch your 'distributed' currency fall under the control of a tyrant.

Someone taking control of the mining process IS a risk, and there are some powerful things you can do with that (like mine 100% of all the new bitcoins, taking control of the supply, and double spending, and rejecting transactions by others), but it would probably take a lot more than $1.2 million dollars because people would fight back, and you are still at risk of the rest of the community forking away from your control. That said, you could still do terrible damage and the price would probably plunge, and you may be able to double spend millions of dollars before enough people noticed to start rejecting your transactions. (are there even millions of dollars worth of things you can buy? and would you have to worry about a government getting involved because you committed financial crimes?)

And even if you manage to maintain control, all that will happen is people will stop using bitcoin until you let up. It's much like a DDOS. It takes power (electricity) to maintain that much computation, and the longer you maintain control, the less bitcoin will be worth.

Edit: I want to add that the scariest attacks only happen at 50% control. At 40%, you can only double spend -sometimes-, and I don't think that you would be able to block transactions at all. Furthermore an organized network (and there is much debate about how organized bitcoin could get, after all it is designed to be distributed) could undo any double spending and you would be limited to slowing bitcoin down. At 20% market power, the probability of you achieving a double spend or undoing some transactions is very small.

Read all the responses. I spent the money because I've been tracking bitcoin for a long time, and I felt confident that I understood the markets. Even if I completely failed as a trader, I should expect to get a fair chunk back. I put in $1200 because as a student it was everything that didn't need to go towards housing.

I expected it to grow very fast. Bitfloor seemed reliable, and many people seemed to be trading on it. I thought it was sound. Even if I lost 100%, I expected the loss to come from my failure as a trader, not from my exchange's failure as a business.

If I do get my money back, I will probably try to join a different bitcoin exchange, though more carefully. I've been trying for almost a month(since btc was about $90 before the crash) and it's incredible how difficult it is to trade bitcoins.

Maybe I'll open my own exchange.

I just yesterday wired Bitfloor over $1000, and they have yet to acknowledge my transaction. The money is gone from my bank and is currently in limbo.

I'm frustrated that they have given so little information out, my recent transaction represents 100% of my disposable income. Perhaps part of the fault is mine, but I thought they were reputable and no warning was given. They are also no longer accepting deposits or acknowledging any in progress deposits.