binarybits

Maybe you should quote the entire paragraph instead of truncating it in a way that makes it look ridiculous. As I said in the next sentence, "Musk is persistent and a quick learner."

And then as I write later in the piece:

"Musk ignored the conventional wisdom, and he has gotten much further than anyone expected. He has sold hundreds of thousands of cars and has hundreds of thousands more people eager to buy the Model 3 as soon as it's available. Moreover, Tesla has had a huge influence on the broader car industry, forcing every major carmaker to take battery electric vehicles seriously."

I see what you mean. Three thoughts on this:

* The time lock on commitment transactions is typically set to be a few days, so you don't need to be online "constantly." At most you need to check in about once a day.

* As the white paper says, you can delegate this function to a third party, without giving the third party the ability to steal your funds.

* If the other party tries to steal your funds and you catch him, you get to steal all of his funds. So in practice I don't expect this to be a common situation. If the other guy believes there's at least a 90 percent chance that you'll check the blockchain on any given day, then the expected value of broadcasting a revoked transaction is going to be heavily negative.

Lightning's core innovation is the use of the Bitcoin blockchain as a cryptographic backstop for payment channels. If the other party in a payment channel stops cooperating, you can broadcast the current commitment transaction to the blockchain, which effectively refunds the current balance back to each party. There's a similar mechanism for enforcing the hashed time lock contracts that make Lightning payment chains possible. I don't know how you could do anything similar with conventional bank transfers.

(1) is false. If you're not online, counterparties might decide to close open channels. But that just means you get your share of the funds in that channel refunded to you. You would need to pay a transaction fee to the bitcoin network for the on-chain transaction, but the other party doesn't get any of your money.

Correct. Also the story took me like an hour to write, so the opportunity cost is low.

Here's a 5,000-word explainer I wrote about how Bitcoin works. It took significantly longer than an hour to write. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/how-bitcoin-work...

We're social creatures. We like interacting with other people more than we like interacting with machines, even if machines are more efficient in a narrow technical sense. I think this is especially clear for nannies--the main job of the nanny is to cuddle and interact with the baby in ways that only a human being can do.

There are plenty of fitness videos and apps, but people still pay a lot of money for in-person fitness classes. People wouldn't stop going to Starbucks even if someone invented a vending machine that could produce coffee that tastes identical for half the cost.

"It seems safe to conclude that someone asked them to write positive stories." As the author of the article in question, I can tell you that this is false.

Given the context and the way corporate boards generally communicate, I'd say an offer to "engage on qualified strategic proposals" is a pretty clear signal that they're interested in acquisition offers.

This is a bug. We're working on fixing it.

Great eye. Will fix. Thanks.

I agree with you in general, but I had to pick some limits to make the piece manageable. Perhaps I'll do 40 maps on the Byzantines at some point in the future.

Italy is over Wyoming. I think you're confusing it with Egypt, which is in the lower-right of the map.

OK, but the same logic can invalidate almost any software patent. Apple's "data detectors" patent, for example, claims the concept of detecting data in a document (an abstract idea, it seems to me) plus a generic description of the steps someone would have to take to implement this on a computer. A data compression patent would cover some mathematical principle (replace frequently-repeated sequences with a shorter representation) with some details about what steps you need to do to implement the idea. I think the court's reasoning could be plausibly read as invalidating all software patents.

I'd say that the Supreme Court isn't so much correcting bad laws as correcting bad Federal Circuit interpretations of the law.

I was mostly thinking about the Internet backbone here, and I think this statement is correct. Until recently, there have been many backbone providers that compete with one another with minimal regulation.

My point isn't that startups shouldn't have profitable exits. It's that I'd like to see more of those exits be IPOs that leave the companies independent, rather than acquisitions.

I think there's something to this, and I say as much in my story. But with exchanges trading at different values, it's hard to know which price is the "real" one.

Thanks!

The same. I mention YC at the end.

For the record, I wrote it on Friday. And almost all articles on the web are "written for ad impression count."

But it's good for readers. And if you have a lot of followers your tweet will get read a lot more times than it's written.

This probably didn't come through well in the transcript, but his point was that other people (e.g. Slashdot's corporate overlords) wanted the graph to go up and to the right, while Malda wanted to focus on catering to a focused tech audience. He's pointing out the conflict, not ignoring it.

Really? You think people in Cuba come to the United States and marvel at what a backward society we have?

What's the disingenuous part?

Very nice.

The idea is that the phone or tablet's copy protection scheme controls access to the low-level firmware/ROM that makes the device operate.

If you read the material at defendinnovation.org, you'll see that they do not oppose patents on software. They call for changes to the patent system designed to make software patents work better. Which is fine, but not the same thing.

By all means sign both the EFF petition and my petition. Still, EFF has never been the kind of organization that tries to cut deals inside the beltway. They've always been an organization that takes principled positions. Given that reputation, I think the implicit message of their campaign--that abolition is too radical even for EFF to endorse--undermines the argument for software patent abolition. I have no problem with them advocating incremental reforms, but they should also say that the ideal reform is eliminating software patents altogether.

The Bay Area's density is a fraction of of New York City's density. Yet rents in the densest parts of NYC are even higher than those in the Bay Area, which suggests that many people want to live there.

Did you read the article or just the headline? You can disagree with my conclusions but I think patent policy is an important topic.