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.
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.
"But I guess the real problem with Programmer Anarchy is that it takes away the central “leader” figure."
This is a common misunderstanding with any sort of anarchy. The formal hierarchy is removed but you will still see leaders. When someone gets excited about a project, they are more likely to step forward and get other people excited about the project. They can take the reins and envision a final product, and encourage other people to work towards the final product. This makes them the informal leader.
It doesn't always work out this way, but any project that has enough people motivated behind it will also have leaders, it's part of natural human interaction.
One of the problems with clinical trials is when industries have billions of dollars to spend creating drugs.
If I flip a fair coin 100 times, and it comes up heads 65 times, we can reasonably conclude that it's not a fair coin.
If I flip 100 coins 100 times and one of them comes up heads 65 times, the probability that it is the unfair coin is much lower.
So it's important to take into account all of the failed drugs during clinical trials when you see one that has succeeded. Especially when a company has gone through dozens or hundreds of failed drugs before coming up with a successful one, you need to make sure that the trials have been numerous to overcome Hoeffding's bound.
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.
Often times, there is enough reason to start over. With computer architectures, this has the risk of making every single existing operating system obsolete on your architecture. If you are planning on hitting a sales volume equivalent to amd64 sales, you can't just start over.
Javascript is a different beast. By building Dart into your webrowser, you don't break the web browser. And while starting over will be an uphill battle, you can address much of the sillyness that holds javascript back and complicates it.
Perhaps we have hit the limit of practical additions to javascript. The post yesterday showed that asm.js isn't actually faster unless your browser actually supports the optimizations, which makes popularizing optimized asm.js almost as difficult as popularizing Dart.
I don't want to be using technology in 40 years that is built upon technology from 40 years ago. At some point we should reset, even the difficult technologies like amd64. How often is not a question I'm qualified to answer but it should happen.
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.
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.
Short term there are only upsides, but in the long run this will weaken the local governments.