eck

Question for someone who understands BTC better than I:

This seems to be the first case where a massive number of BTC were seized by police. Since BTC is a consensus algorithm, what would happen if 51% of BTC users wanted to take those BTC away from the FBI and give them to someone else (or perhaps nobody, just remove them from existence and deflate the BTC) how feasible would that be?

Not much. A fraction of Americans have negative net worths. If you have no debts and a nickel in your pocket, you're worth more than all of them put together. It's an oft-used misleading statistic.

You pair them randomly so as two co-conspirators can't arrange to work together. You make sure the ones who are paired don't trust each other. You tell them that they are expected to report any suspicious behavior -- like someone mentioning the constitution -- and that they will be tested. You do test them. They get paired with an incognito auditor whose job is to offhandedly mention that what they're doing is violating someone's rights. If they don't report him, they're disciplined.

Of course, all these things also make it hard to convince them that they're the good guys.

I know the author is a long-hellbanned hn user, possibly with some kind of mental illness.

But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It does boot...

It's an odd curses-like interface, with lots of blinking and scrolling. There are command-line looking things around, but all of the commands are kind of like C statements, like instead of 'cd ..' you have to do 'Cd("..");'. Really odd. There's a blue box that pops up possible completions, but it seems to have a whole dictionary in addition to commands.

Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend fully isolating it...

Another interesting story about precious metals in bank vaults:

During the Manhattan project they needed to build something with a ridiculous amount of copper coils, and copper was scarce due to the war. So they used silver instead. Who cares if it's more expensive, if that machine is going to be more heavily guarded than any bank anyway and you can always melt it back into ingots when you're done?

What I would vastly prefer over this is if laptop manufacturers would just make it so the power input could be switched into max-power-point-tracker mode. Almost all the electronics necessary to plug a solar panel into a laptop are already there; they probably just require some firmware changes.

> How long before some unstable government seeking to wreck havoc on its world’s communications infrastructure starts shooting down Loon balloons overhead?

I suspect that the surface-to-air missiles capable of striking targets at that altitude are an order of magnitude more expensive than what it costs Google to replace balloons.

If Iran or North Korea starts shooting down balloons, I bet the US Government will be happy to quietly reimburse the replacement cost simply to deplete the supply of SAMs that could be shot at other things.

If a cell phone company really had balls, they'd make a website where you can see realtime and historical location data for every cellphone owned by every elected official and federal judge. They have "no privacy interest", after all, so I guess that would be no big deal...

Let's be clear. This guy operates at 52Hz, but he probably has more spatial resolution than cobra dane.

obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/482/

The title (and the first comment on the link) makes it sound like it's a perpetual motion machine, but as far as I can tell it's more like a tiny heat-pump: energy is conserved, entropy increases. Still kind of neat though.

Uh, super. Are you missing the fact that if these are flying over your city they are paid for by your taxes and the police will just buy another one, probably a bigger and more expensive one, justifying it by saying that "criminals are shooting them down because they're scared of them" or something?

Also, if you think that a trip to a hackerspace qualifies you to build a UAV, I really don't want your armed UAV flying over my head. Maybe start with a $1M+ budget and a team of qualified aerospace, mechanical, and electrical engineers. Ones currently with well-paying, legal jobs willing to leave those to work on your angsty teenage temper tantrum that would ultimately be counterproductive anyway. I have experience with model airplanes and robotics and I'm against this as much as the next guy but if you asked me to join your team I would report you to the FBI before a model airplane with a shotgun duct taped to it crashes into my roof.

If you really want to take criminal action to stop this, you should... no, I'm not going to tell you, lest you're dumb enough to try.

I'm reminded of Henry Kissinger's quip on the Iran-Iraq war:

"It's too bad they both can't lose."

Old trick. Go search for [postscript snowflake] sometime. Great fun for drawing psychedelic images and/or crashing network printers. (It turns out that .ps is actually an archaic programming language and not just a page description language.)

SparkFun is lucky that the subpoena was for one of their products being used in a credit card skimmer and not an improvised cruise missile.

Also, protip for criminals: make your own circuit boards without identifying marks.

Thanks, codeflo. I calculated similar numbers and only gave a very crude approximation but I will take your word for it. Obviously, with the thermal distribution according to altitude it's a poorly defined problem.

Most intuitively, this means that when looking at some object on earth ~5 miles away, you are looking through roughly as much air as you are when looking at any given planet or star above you in the sky.

I think this is an interesting comparison.

Another interesting perspective: Earth's atmosphere is about five miles thick. Yes, it trails off exponentially and airplanes can fly and people can breathe (sort of) at 30,000 feet. However, were it uniformly as dense as it is at sea level (i.e. the atmosphere most of us are familiar with), it would fit in about five miles.

That's not how the math works. It's 2/3 * 435 = 290, so they're still 42 votes short.

That is because yahoo has its own servers and yahoo.com is the only website at that IP. For mere mortals like me with a dreamhost account or something, there's probably dozens of sites on the same IP, so your computer has to first connect to the IP then send the HTTP "Host:" header to say what site it wants.

Victims of piracy have better lobbyists than the victims of identity theft.

Fishy but not unexpected. Online publications always switch off comments when they see a huge traffic bump and realize they have made fools of themselves and are being told as much in the comments.

For example, a few weeks ago the NYTimes Public Editor made a blog post about whether it should be their policy to note in articles when public figures are obviously lying in their remarks. (They're worried about seeming like the liberal media and they think they should "fairly balance" truth and fiction on issues like climate change or what percentage of planned parenthood's money is spent on abortions.) This resulted in immediate outrage from the commenters and vicious comments. Not profanity -- articulate rebuttals that just made the NYTimes look like idiots. Comments switched off. Later they attempted to walk it back, poorly. Same articulate rebuttals, NYTimes look like idiots again. Comments switched off even faster. Not even sure why they enabled them on the second post to begin with.

Isn't this one of the things TPMs are designed to defend you against? The TPM only releases the encryption key after the right password is entered, some number of wrong passwords cause a reset, and perhaps a single duress code instantly causes a reset? Once the TPM is erased, who's to tell if it wasn't just broken to begin with.

I am sort of surprised that pg chose movies rather than music. Movies are hard. You need a lot of things to make a movie. I liked Avatar. You can't do that kind of thing on the cheap. Actors, sites, makeup, lighting, special effects, etc. For music, you need the band, which are essentially founders from an equity standpoint, and own their own instruments already since they know how to play them. You need like $1000 of recording gear and some dude to hit the "record" button.

Eventually movies will be democratized, but killing the RIAA/iTunes cabal seems like the obvious first step.

The webmaster wanted you to see it. If browsers didn't show the content of a 404, webmasters would just send you the same "not found" page but with a 200 code, which would be even worse.

Suppose you are injured or are having chest pains and need medical attention urgently. Then what is the link between having a cell phone and surviving? I would wager that effect is several orders of magnitude greater than any cancer effect.

TLDR: Netflix raises subscription cost 60%. The comments on the post are vicious.

They are duplicitous. DVD by mail is not a separate product. It is a workaround for the fact that they have failed to license their entire library for streaming. Now they have a perverse incentive to limit their streaming library to encourage people to pay extra for DVD service.

[edit] Now had they just said, "Hollywood is putting the screws to us, we need to raise our prices" I could respect that.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

I can't wait until Anonymous starts sending infringement notices in bulk. Cutting off people's Internet access based on a few random threats is a pretty obvious denial of service vulnerability.

It always annoys me when people throw around numbers like 14g and start comparing themselves to fighter jets. If you jump a few inches into the air and land on a hard surface with your knees locked, the momentary acceleration would be pretty impressive. That doesn't make you an F-15. Fighter jets can maintain those accelerations for seconds on end.

State machines should be force-fed simply because they are the simplest computational model, and if they are sufficient for a task, to use something more complicated would be illogical. Indeed, in computer science school, they generally are force-fed, followed of course by force-feedings of push-down automata and various Turing Machines. (And if your web app is modeled as a very long tape, that is probably bad.)