fl3tch

It's a real currency market, it's just at the Bonnie and Clyde stage of its evolution. Consider how lax bank security was in the 1930s that a single couple could rob banks for years with a fraction of the sophistication of modern day bank robbers.

You couldn't get away with it today, not for that long, but it was possible with "real" money, "real" banks, all government backed, at one time. And that had centralization and identity built into it. The bitcoin community isn't big enough to have serious security professionals yet, but that doesn't disqualify it as a currency market.

And imagine the wide variety of people that he interviews. Being a good interviewer like that takes talent and intelligent because he has to become a quasi-expert in pretty much everything, within a week.

> I decide to view the profiles of all those who clicked the ads

What? I thought advertisers didn't have access to that info. That's pretty creepy. And while he's talking about them in the article, he should have thrown in their names and links to their profiles for good measure.

When you rent a car, you usually pay for insurance specifically for that car, for the few days you drive it. Why would this be different?

What great world we would live in if all stocks increased that linearly.

> I think it's also worth noting that the US already gets 70% of all its taxes from the top 10%

Yes, but they also own 70% of all the wealth[1], according to 2007 numbers (the percentage is almost certainly a little higher today), so that's perfectly proportional. If you own 70% of the wealth, you should pay 70% of the taxes.

http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-in...

While this is true, browsers could benefit from a "bittorrent-lite" implementation. You get the files from a server, but they come with metadata like a .torrent file, which includes hashes for small chunks of the file. Downloads are automatically checked and can resume anywhere. It could all be transparent to the user. Really, it's amazing this isn't the default way to download yet.

Couldn't they stamp RST packets with the IP addresses of other file sharers? That would reset the connections with those nodes.

Thank you. Finally some common sense to counter the libertarian anti-government sentiment. Whenever they tell you that government run schools are failing, ask them why the government run schools in other countries are performing so much better. Whenever they say that government can't allocate resources efficiently, point them to the governments that have balanced their budgets. It is possible. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The solution to bad government is not to abandon it, but to work ever harder to improve it.

Getting the money / corporate influence out of government would be the place to start.

10 minutes browsing through the handbook and I already found great info that I did not know:

The Debian package format is designed so that its content may be extracted on any Unix system that has the classic commands ar, tar, and gzip. This seemingly trivial property is important for portability and disaster recovery.

This is actually up to the client. In Firefox about:config, network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer is set to true by default, so it does send it, but you can turn it off.

At least you get a choice among hundreds of VPN providers and can choose a privacy-respecting one, whereas most of us are stuck with a monopoly or duopoloy in ISPs.

I agree with a lot of what you said, but this:

> People can today do useful and novel life science work for a few tens of thousands of dollars

makes me wonder if you've ever done bench work or furnished a lab. Sure, you can do a few weeks or months of work for tends of thousands of dollars (which doesn't produce a lot of useful results in that time frame, but can produce some), but that's assuming you have a functioning lab. It often takes $100K just to stock one, which is why most new investigators get special startup money just for that. To produce useful results often takes years at a rate of at least $100K a year. Equipment and reagents (especially enzymes) can be expensive. $300 for a gel box here, $1000 for a pipette there, $5000 for a thermocycler, $2000 for an enzyme, it adds up. And that's not even getting into salaries. Most people don't work alone.

I think it would be incredibly difficult to crowdfound science a la something like Kickstarter, especially with the amount of money currently spent on science (about $50 billion annually in the US alone). But maybe someone on HN will be the person who proves me wrong.

Having a record implies that you were present at X Clinic. If it's a specialist clinic, then confirming the existence of patient record could allow someone to infer the condition or a range of conditions. Most clinics won't confirm or deny that a patient is there (or has records) without a release. In this case, though, we don't know where the record was stored.

What?

Ctrl + Alt + cursor key works exactly as described. Also,

    sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv

works like a charm. Maybe you tried while their repos were being slammed on release day. Perhaps you should give it more than a 15 second effort. :)

If you were coming from 11.04, you'd have to upgrade to 11.10 anyway, since you can only upgrade from one release directly to the next one, or one LTS to the next. That's why I suspect you were on 11.04 and not 10.04 (it's not possible to upgrade directly from 10.04 or 10.10 to 11.10).

The alternative would have been a clean reinstall.

So basically you did the right thing.

I believe some European governments, because of mandates to use open source, want to fund the Document Foundation to get much better support for Office formats. Maybe in 5 years that argument will be moot too. Well, a boy can dream.

> But, from what I've read, those high-paying law school jobs are very few, only for the elite of the elite, and requires the new employee to work insane hours. Same for those MBAs.

My sister got a law degree and then did an internship specializing in tax law (I know). She got a job last year straight out of college (at age 25) making $130,000 at a firm that handles the tax issues when one company wants to acquire another. Among all the jobs you could have as a corporate (and especially tax) lawyer, it seemed pretty cool. One of her early projects involved a well-known entertainment company that wanted to buy another entertainment company (although the deal eventually fell through).

In recent months she's been crying a lot and wanting to quit. She works 6-7 days a week and 12+ hours a day. She's never home and has no life. She'd rather start her own restaurant, which is something that she's always had a passion for. Even if her pay were cut to 25% of what it is now for the first few years, she says she would be happier, but she's contractually stuck in this job for a minimum of 12 months (until September), so it's kind of a personal hell. Also, there's the sunk cost issue. She's already devoted 8 years of her life and $100,000 to preparing for this career, so it's hard to just walk away.

My point is, good money is rarely easy.

Very few (although it does happen), because generally law enforcement takes a lot of time and great care to build a case. They may allow a drug gang to operate for months or years before busting them. This case seems rather rushed.

Do you have cookies disabled? The page won't load unless you allow cookies for blogspot.com. Annoying, I know.

Or at least offer something in between $0 and $100/yr, like 10 GB for $20/yr and 20 GB for $40/yr (same price per GB as the 50 GB plan).

> Many VPN services claim that they do not maintain connection logs

If you're paying for the service, then you need to authenticate to it either with a password or certificate. Either way, the VPN provider knows when you're connected. Also, to prevent sharing of accounts, they will often limit the number of IP addresses you can connect from (within a certain period of time), which means that almost all of them log IP addresses and connection times. That information, combined with other evidence, could be enough to connect you to certain activities.

For example, suppose you're harassing someone on a forum and they get the cops involved. They know the date and time of all of your posts, so they go to your VPN provider, and you're the only person who was connected every single time a post was made. Now, it's good to catch people like that, but if you require strong anonymity just use Tor.

> "When anonymity is a factor, pay with an un-trackable currency," explains Andrew from PrivateInternetAccess.

> "For example, signup for an anonymous e-mail account using Tor and use a Bitcoin Mixer to send Bitcoins to a newly generated address in your local wallet.

Kind of pointless to go to such lengths when the VPN provider has your IP address.

One problem with the privacy-protectionist view is that half of my email recipients use one of the three major email services (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail), so even if I decided not to use them, half of my email would end up on their servers. Taking that into consideration, and adding the fact that I haven't found an email service that I've liked within an order of magnitude of Gmail, it doesn't make sense to boycott it. You just have to assume that the email providers are reading your messages and act accordingly. Some things I talk about over email, and some things I don't.

My God, you're right. I was never able to contact anybody before Facebook. It's a wonder I know other people at all.

Seriously, though, the biggest argument in favor of it that I hear is event invitations. But think about it, if the most effort that somebody can put into inviting you to their event is clicking a button to "send to all", they don't really value your friendship. I don't have a Facebook account, and when people invite me to something, they send a personal message that signals they actually value my friendship and want me to attend. As someone on the Internet said, Facebook maintains friendships in a persistent vegetative state.

> your friends can volunteer information about you indirectly by using "smart lists"

I didn't even know about this, but it illustrates that merely signing up exposes you to potential privacy violations. We recently became aware of how much of a liability it is for employers to look at Facebook profiles, because they may learn intimate details about a person's sexual orientation, religion, politics, etc. The only solution is to never look.

Likewise, the only way to adequately protect your privacy is to never sign up on Facebook. BTW, this takes care of the employer problem, too.

To be fair, that data is distributed across many entities. What people worry about is any single company aggregating too much data. Google can get all your searches, email, some purchases (through Wallet), social connections and interests, phone calls, voice mails and location data. Now they could literally record everything you see. I think that's why some people might be reticent about using this.

If a HUD could focus it, then why couldn't corrective glasses?

In an age when most computers come with 4+ GB of RAM, I think people focus too much on memory. Of course there are older computers, but their OS should be using comparably less RAM. WinXP takes up 100 MB at login, so if you only have 1 GB on an older computer, you should still have no problem running modern Firefox. And if you only have 512 MB, it's probably time to upgrade since the web experience that a modern browser can offer you will be crippled by your old hardware.

A few months ago I had a conversation with somebody who complained that Firefox used too much memory (about 600 MB). I asked how much he had. He said 3 GB. That seemed more than enough to me, after all Gnome consumes 200-500 MB at login, depending on whether you're using 32 or 64 bit and which shell you're running (Gnome 2, Gnome Shell, Unity, etc). Turns out, Win7 was eating 2 GB at login, leaving him with only a gigabyte for other programs.

In my view, the operating system is just a platform to launch other stuff. It shouldn't use more than 25% of your memory. If it does, you should either get more RAM or slim down your OS. If his computer obeyed my rubric, he'd have plenty of room for Firefox. His anger was obviously directed at the wrong problem, but for some reason the OS (and all the crapware which loads at boot and runs in the background, even when it's not needed, consuming precious resources) gets a pass.

People are already working on this:

https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox