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arst | 15 years ago | on: Betting on Bitcoin: Fundamentals vs Technical Analysis

You can include a transaction bounty (traditionally 0.01 BTC) with your payment which the verifiers receive if they're the first to verify your payment. Effectively, this puts your transaction at the top of the priority queue. When you're connected to a healthy number of peers, this can bring down the verification time down to seconds.

Isn't transaction verification tied to block generation, and isn't block generation limited to about 1 every 10 minutes?

arst | 15 years ago | on: Mozilla tells DHS: we won't help you censor the Internet

In fact, if the statistics are accurate, my country has a higher murder rate (5 per 100K) than the "libertarian paradise" of Somalia (3.2 per 100K) (2) who have no central government (3).

There have been over 4,200 civilians killed in the fighting in Mogadishu in just the last 2 years (1). Even if that were the extent of violent crime in Somalia it would amount to an annual rate of ~23 per 100k. By all accounts, however, violent crime remains extraordinarily high throughout the entire country, we just can't put numbers to it because there are no authorities to report to. Here's some more context: over 1.5 million Somalis have been internally displaced by the violence, and over 600,000 have fled to other countries (2).

That number on Wikipedia is so low because it came from a 2004 WHO report which was compiled using data from national authorities - the vast majority of violent crime in Somalia never gets reported to any authority.

1) http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/article782458.ece/4200-Som... 2) http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e483ad6.html

arst | 15 years ago | on: What is this all about? - Our website is officially launched.

As someone who's never heard of Qbix I came away from this post with the knowledge that you make "tools to accomplish things with" that represent "a leap in social communication." Oh, and that you're out to change the world. Before clicking around the site I actually thought it was a parody.

arst | 15 years ago | on: Google's Android faces a serious Linux copyright issue

Those conditions don't apply because Google is accused of distributing a derived work. If Google is distributing a work derived from GPL'd code then they can only distribute that work under the terms of the GPL. There's a lot of debate over whether what Google's distributing can actually be considered a derived work, but that's a separate question entirely.

arst | 15 years ago | on: Google's Android faces a serious Linux copyright issue

If I copy GPL-licensed code into my BSD-licensed library, none of my code has to be relicensed.

Yes it does, that's a pretty central feature of the GPL. See section 2.b. of the GPL (v2):

b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

arst | 15 years ago | on: Show HN: three.io = available 3 letter .io domains

Looks like it has already been registered, but it's worth noting that the .io TOS includes:

No .IO domain may be used, directly or indirectly, for any purpose that is sexual or pornographic or that is against the statutory laws of any Nation.

arst | 15 years ago | on: CouchOne + Membase merge

I think people are tainted on Map/Reduce because they see how it is done with other NoSQL DBs like MongoDB where it doesn't store the indexes

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by stored indexes, but MongoDB supports indexes (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Indexes), it just doesn't require them so you can perform exploratory ad-hoc queries when you need to.

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