iwr

A web of trust would not need to be too deep to start working. After all, it takes just a couple of acquaintance hops to connect 90% of the people on Earth. Not sure about the 6-degrees-of-separation thing, but it's probably on the order of that.

The greater problem of a distributed system would be public key revocation, because you have to go through your entire contacts list to publish a new key.

South Africa doesn't receive that much aid in relative terms.

It's incorrect to blame the Africans. Aid failed not because people there are somewhat less civilized (hypersexual bullshit), but because foreign aid money is feeding the dictators that maintain the system. The big cash doesn't come from exports, but from naive westerners feeding them aid money. That way, whatever leader crops up, he would have a stake in maintaining a poor, half-starving people.

Africans are no different human beings, they're just subjected to the same incentives everyone else is.

When all else fails, just use a merchant account.

Also, no international support. A real paypal alternative must be broadly international.

tl;dr version:

"There are things you can do in one state or online that will get you in the fucking klink for years in another state. That Jury wanted 25 years of a man’s life because he sold CD-ROMs they didn’t like. They wanted tens of thousands of dollars from him after he got out. Meanwhile a woman stole images from Playboy, Disney and who knows else, sold those same CD-ROMs by the truckload, and made millions."

Is this dongle a future-proof way to keep up with firmware upgrades?

Scenario: new upgrade comes, x3 dongle guys distribute a patch automatically after a few days/weeks

The comparison is wrong. Informations that could lead to the downfall of a corporation would not be plain industrial secrets (irrelevant politically). Companies would have nothing to fear if they did nothing objectionable from an ethical or criminal standpoint.

Can PayPal really afford to say no? The government has many ways it can make life miserable for the company.

It won't be bad if they start getting fan clubs, groupies and sponsorship deals.

Remember the last Declaration of independence triggered a war. Don't expect the political to consider any accessible space off-limits.

While PayPal deserves the negative rep for screwing their customers, it doesn't deserve it for being a US corporation, vulnerable to the US government. The bad guy here is not PayPal.

This is the original link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/mo...

Steve Jobs was saying that netbooks are merely cheap laptops: bad as ultramobile devices and bad as laptops.

How is the 11" Air compared to a regular netbook?

i(j) squared is -1 if we're talking about complex numbers and 1 for split-complex numbers. Each is an interesting class of numbers.

If the contraptions are cheap enough, or the footage valuable enough, there'd be no need to recover it.

If those things have enough range, you can just stay indoors, safe from police interference. It would be very difficult to trace unless the cops ran around in triangulation squads.

Other ways to do it could be by wireless internet.

Aleph-null?

I'd like to see a site that used the proposed karma system. It feels a little complex, though.

RC planes (drones): soon the staple of any serious paparazzi.

You must mean pretentiousness, surely.

A meta-patent? Would still be vulnerable to meta-meta patenting tactics.

Did anyone here use one of those contraptions? Any thoughts?

Also, Telecom Greenland has a nice fiber cable running through Newfoundland-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland.

One day, Chinese central planners decided to do a city "right", from the ground up, complete with utilities, roads etc... all for 1 million people to live in it. Turns out, it's a ghost town:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397,00.htm...

A pretty ghost town nonetheless.

A site with a sitemap, but nothing else (already ranked) linking to it would probably not get indexed.

Since when has legality had to matter for hackers when hacking?

You forget the full-screen flash ads, with music and no X in the corner.

Even in such a case, breaking the contract would make you subject to tort, rather than criminal law. Meaning you'd have to pay some form of compensation (which would have to be expressly specified in the contract), but not go to prison.

How do you get around the network-effect benefits of large cultures? While more vulnerable by being larger (and a more attractive target), these cultures also develop self-defense mechanisms and an ecosystem of support.

While a custom culture may be safer from wide scale attacks, it's still more vulnerable to targeted attacks. If you're a bank and you rely on security-by-obscurity you are in greater danger than if using a tested and documented standard system.

As an aside, the potato famine was not caused by a singular condition. The law of the land up to some time before the famine prohibited the purchase of land by Catholics; only about 7% of the agricultural land was actually in the hands of the Irish. This meant the vast majority of them were serfs to English lords and had to rely on small/fragmented patches of land to feed themselves. The reason potatoes were grown was that no other crops could be grown on these small plots. In the absence of potatoes, people would have been starving much sooner.