lurker456

I hate it being done without informed consent. It's also a huge waste of electricity. On the plus side it could lead to micropayment funded instead of ad-funded sites.

facebook is as much just a website as the catholic church is just some buildings with a book. there is a lot behind it.

If they had a requirement to report each breach promptly, we'd have known far sooner there was a problem there, and the pressure to improve security would have been higher. They have been leaking for years.

if the nerve endings between brain and shoulder are there, it could still work. The device would need to give consistent feedback for the brain to be trained. it's similar to a stroke victim learning to walk again.

less, for several reasons

- in the US system, treating symptoms instead of the underlying cause is easier for the doctor and more profitable in the long run.

- "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"; less patients that wait until pain is unbearable (due to its cost) which then need different treatment.

- less conflict of interest that affect what doctors prescribe

- there is only one buyer, with a strong negotiation position, potential profits are capped

The odds of a commercial bank going bust is higher then Germany going bust. Commercial banks only need to keep a few % of the money deposited at them on their books (its called fractional reserve banking), the other 95% or so can be invested or lent out elsewhere. There are regulations that restrict the risk, require hedging, insurance, etc but those don't help much if the insurer or a significant amount of the borrowers go bust as well due to systemic problems.

bitcoin is a byzantine fault tolerant distributed database, it's performance characteristics are different.

suburban sprawl is arguably a result of the obsession with cars

And past performance guarantees future performance ?

Also, bear in mind that an overwhelming majority of the people who invented all this good stuff (scientists) agree that we're approaching a cliff.

To paraphrase a comment about virtual currencies: If you have a hard problem and try to solve it with a blockchain, you now have 2 hard problems.

what alternative do you have in mind ?

How many ISPs can you choose from where you live ? They have an effective monopoly or duopoly in many regions in the US.

in addition to that, "but what about google" is no defence for what last mile ISPs are doing. If google ever becomes too ubiquitous as a gatekeeper (it's already at that point according to the EU antitrust commission) they'll also need to be regulated.

While a 51% attack is a real concern, an even more likely scenario is the network going down. During a network split the local node(s) will happily continue to ingest logs which once the network is healed will all be rejected.

further evidence of how postgreSQL is eating noSQL. Every good concept first implemented in a custom noSQL solution eventually becomes an extension in postgres.

A blockchain does not offer that guarantee either. The shared consensus it achieves comes at the cost of occasionally discarding stuff.

The few protections it does offer against tampering can be achieved in a much simpler way for your scenario (signing)

especially when the customer differs from the users

While having a plan is important, it's not the only way a human approaches chess. Experienced chess players develop an ability to evaluate positions intuitively. Without being able to explain fully why and without a specific plan in mind, they're able choose the best position out of several options. In a way, it's very similar to a evaluation function without access to its internal logic.

I imagine there are not many things with unexpected shapes at that level that aren't accounted for somehow. Anything that doesn't slot into it perfectly will get knocked away by collisions. Bad shapes do exist however (prions) and are a cause of diseases.

That's a bit like comparing a water utility company versus a company selling bottled water. One has a natural monopoly (and likely only exists thanks to generous government support), the other does not.

RDBMS's have gone through the same journey. First it was hardcoded, now for many of them we can specify the codepage or UTF encoding and collation of a DB, some even offer it per table or column, and so on.

Filesystems should do the same. Either pick one way and stick to it (expose it as UTF8, with a sensible normalization and collation) or offer several options that can be specified when creating a volume and do on the fly conversions for clients that need it.

Couldn't google offer him immunity of sorts in return for spilling the beans on Uber ? They dont need to claw back the money, it is pocket change to them. Restricting Uber from entering that market (on potentially near equal footing) is far more valuable.

But spending that $200 billion on primary education doesn't make it disappear in a black hole either.

One could even argue that money spent on DOD budgets trickles down less to the inhabitants of the state that raised the money in taxes in the first place compared to money spent on education.

Michael Hastings and Kenneth Lay come to mind. No proof obviously.

Would that be a bad thing though ? Assuming assistants are ubiquitous. We don't use punch cards in interviews today. Even today whiteboard interviews are sometimes not the best method to fill certain roles.

Yes, and it's been going on for at least a decade. It's why they rushed through an emergency bill with support from both parties in 2014 to retroactively grant immunity. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/10/uk_government_rushes...

The amount of dormant coins is not that large anymore. I read somewhere it's on the order of 30%. If they enter all at once the pool it would be a significant haircut for everyone else, but not the end. More significant risks are an 51% attack, a bug in the protocol, a bug in the implementation of a widely used client, or a major government making it illegal to trade them.

it's possible to do such optimizations for a (safe) subset of javascript, such as these pure functions.

Arguably java has a larger subset even today.

why would 3 be unlikely ? The snowden leaks indicate that 3 letter agencies will use high value 0-days sparingly, to ensure they remain 0-days.

Also, there is a 5th (more likely) possibility: SA didn't find anything, but undiscovered holes do exist.

Great news that this finally came to light.

After learning about remote management capabilities I've always suspected it had holes. Large attack surface, any exploit would have a high value, and closed source.

Perhaps one day we'll be able to buy CPU's without this "feature". I'm betting AMD and ARM are in the same boat.

they are