epscylonb

Someone said the other day in the submission about Tent, they should have published a protocol first. It should have been designed before they wrote any code, app.net at least seems to have this in it's favour.

I agree.

I hate adverts, but I think app.net is unlikely to topple FB or Twitter in the social sector.

Myspace is a warning to Twitter and FB, if you don't look after your users, improve your service and keep them happy then you the advertisers will leave too.

Sure the advertisers are a force that doesn't necessarily align with the users, but this is something the people running the network have to mitigate, because it isn't in their intrests to piss off their users.

That being said, I think advertising is in a bubble, so from that perspective app.net has an advantage.

Probably not that high, but you may be surprised.

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001001.html

"If you look at something like a Boeing 747 -- that's over a quarter of a billion dollars, buying a 747," he said. "You need two of them for a round trip. But nobody is paying half a billion dollars to fly from L.A. to London. It's a few thousand dollars, and that's because you reuse that aircraft multiple times, you use it thousands of times."

Airlines have always been subsidised by taxpayers, in fact air travel has never been super profitable even with the subsidies.

This is the big problem with acquiring bitcoin right now, of course once you have it, transactions are very cheap.

If you run a service where you need to pay bitcoins out to users then that means your systems have to respond to user input and send money to them.

It turns out this is pretty tricky to secure.

The current popular strategy is to have hot and cold wallets. A hot wallet is online and can make payouts automatically.

A cold wallet is kept offline (airgap) and brought online by a human being to refill the hot wallet when it is running low. This only really makes sense if your service needs to secure large amounts of bitcoin for a long time without using them.

This recent bitcoinica hack is pretty inexplicable, they were keeping a large amount of coin in an account at an exchange called MtGox. This is effectively a hot wallet.

I am personally amazed at how much the author of bitcoin got right, he is clearly a genius.

However, bitcoin is not perfect, interestingly, it seems as though bitcoin's creator did not predict the rise of mining pools. They could eventually exert the same amount of influence over the bitcoin economy as banks do today with government backed money.

There are other technical issues which could relatively easily be fixed in the code but would require a "hardfork", a change in the protocol meaning that either all nodes upgrade to the new protocol, or a new blockchain is started.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

The biggest fallacy in the article is that people with large bitcoin balances are "comfortable" leaving their "wealth" there.

The market is very thin, any large selloffs would make the price drop significantly.

There is value in aggregation, and more specifically curation.

This is essentially what paper news does at the moment, and people are willing to pay for it.

Rushed legislation is usually bad legislation.

As a UK citizen I agree with you, the real problem is the apathetic electorate though, we get the politicians we deserve.

Before copyright, people still made a living from music, books, art, etc. It was just a different model, patronage was common, the modern equivalent is probably something like kickstarter. Even under the current system, most artists don't make a living straight away, they have to gain recognition whilst doing something else before it becomes their full time job.

And this business model really isn't as alien as you might think, many industries require deposits, milestone based payment, etc.

However, despite having been corrupted by greedy entities into a parody of it's original purpose, copyright has undeniably been beneficial to western culture over the past 100 years.

I believe there will be a grand bargain at some point, where citizens will be asked how long a copyright should last for, and an agreement will be reached. "pirating" will become something that is seen as morally wrong by society (at the moment most people see it as "a bit naughty" at worst).

How long it will take for the corporations to give up on copyrights that last more than a human lifetime is difficult to say. It is surprising to me that americans are willing to put up with a system which means that the only video of martin luther kings i have a dream speech will likely never enter the public domain.

Actually since the beginning of the year bitcoin's price has been relatively stable, around the $5 mark.

Whether this is the natural market price or if there is manipulation going on is hard to tell.

Certainly bitcoin is more volatile than the dollar, pound or euro but those currencies fluctuate in value too.

Bitcoin will be volatile whilst new coins are being minted, it is in an inflationary phase and the only upwards pressure will come from demand outstripping the supply.

Agreed, bitcoin wallets can and have been stolen, but it is difficult to imagine a scenaerio involving bitcoin and 10 million separate individuals.

The only thing I can think of is if bitcoin becomes really popular and lots of people use hosted wallets over the web. This will always have a certain amount of risk, after all who thought linode would get hacked? (seemingly from the inside).

The solution will probably be some kind of insurance, much like how gold is secured today. I can envision bitcoin savings wallets(which don't need to be online) being put into some kind of uber secure virtual vault.

Is this the endgame, apps split between client and server?.

I sincerely hope not, the current popularity for moving things client is just a band aid. The real problem is the network is not quick and redundant enough.

Ideally every node on the internet would be a server.

The smart people in the music industry know that to remain relevant they need to stay close to the artists. This once lopsided relationship is changing to be more equal, the record companies need the artists to make money.

There is value in curation, marketing and management. I expect some of the current media companies will surive but they will look different and be much more competitive.

I wonder what impact these phenomena would or could have on planets like earth.

1) with enough widespread adoption this would be smoothed out, after all the value of the dollar against other currencies is not static either.

2) yup, this is a problem, though I believe technically it should be a capital gain in most countries.

3) This is also clearly a problem though not an unsurmountable one. The cool thing about bitcoin is that you don't have to run the wallet locally, but you have the choice of doing so if you want to. With widespread adoption I believe you would see banks who host wallets, this is how your average person would interact with bitcoin. The final piece of the puzzle is bitcoin insurance to guard against a nefarious wallet hoster, we don't have this yet but there is no reason why it can't be done.

I think 5 years.

I suspect the business model that is most likely to work is an extension of the current one.

Larger multiplexes with more screens, when you go to the cinema you have a wide choice of movies to see.

Movies would no longer drop out of the cinema within a week or two.

In this controlled environment it is easier for the cinemas to prevent copying.

Only after a long cinema run would the film be released on DVD, after which point the copyright expires and you can copy to your hearts content.

I can even see this business model perhaps working for music as well.

I agree, but apparently we are in the age of the polymath.

My problem is that I am often tired when I get home from work, not that I am procrastinating as such.

But there are a ton of things I would like to do, anyone got an algorithm for beating tiredness?.

Anachronistic is the word you are looking for.

The licence fee made perfect sense when it was created, it arguably has been unfair to consumers since VHS became popular.

The cost of creating the content has come down too, people tend to talk about this more in the context of film but it applies equally to TV too.

"A consistent reduction in cloud height would allow Earth to cool to space more efficiently, reducing the surface temperature of the planet and potentially slowing the effects of global warming."

So this would appear to counter act the global warming aspect of climate change.

I could see a NAS needing to be upgraded more often than this device.

If the software and feature set were stable and mature enough then I can't see you needing to upgrade it very often.

I was thinking more of a Raspberry Pi, though obviously combining this device with the router does make sense.

If consumer networks were as reliable as roads and the electricity grid, why would I bother giving my data to someone so they can put it in a datacenter?.

The future I would like best is a device on the end of my home internet connection.

I could authenticate myself to other online services against it.

It could be a node in a social network (much like diaspora) where I can control all my own data.

It could have access to a NAS at home, allowing me to stream my favourite music and movies to wherever I happen to be.

In the future, with resilient enough networks, the datacenter will be distributed.

I think this letter is silly, but it is a partly a problem that Apple helped create.

The closed nature of the App store leads people to think that apps purchased through it can never be malicious, they probably think Apple check every line of code (if they think about it at all).

I am not suggesting that it is Apples fault, but in a closed ecosystem higher security is expected.

Basically this is the same problem we have been dealing with since the rise of Windows, users have no clue about security.

I don't think the author implied anything other than correlation, but interesting question none the less.

As I understand it, pre 9/11 air travel domestically in the USA was like hopping on a bus.

Europe had terrorist incidents involving planes long before 9/11. As a consequence air travel (domestic or international) had greater security checks but nowhere near the level we see now in America.

Here is the problem, no amount of security checks can guarantee that there will not be a terrorist incident on a plane.

Even accounting for 9/11, other terrorist incidents on airplanes and plane crashes, the likelihood of you being killed in one is very small.

But the politicians are faced with a decision, respect civil liberties and relax security to common sense levels or ratchet up security to ridiculous levels. If they do the first and a terrorist attack occurs they will get the blame.

Ultimately it is a risk problem, and it is the voters that need to tell those in charge that they understand the risk and won't blame the government for "not protecting them" if something bad happens to them.

They aren't going to stop writing checks, they are going to write checks to different politicians (or people trying to get elected).

While the electorate are apathetic, moneyed interests will get their way.