mckoss

I don't think that's the best approach to protecting our freedoms. While many of the provisions in the previous act are similar, I think the new order expands the power to go beyond merely protecting the flow of materials and equipment under government contract, to encompass virtually any industrial process or service that the government deems critical.

I think it's important to examine the order, determine why and how it was revised, and understand what political forces are aligned behind its revision.

Section 304 defines the right to subsidize oil companies if the cost of supply goes up. It also allows them to create loan guarantees of any size to prop up a favored industry or business.

Section 308 gives the right to the government to install THEIR OWN equipment in a private facility and to expand it and determine the operating procedure for that facility that the government deems to be in the best interest of preserving a critical resource.

The government could basically take over any private industry or sector under this order for the purposes of national defense whether we are in a state of emergency OR NOT.

On initial reading, I think This order has a very high chance of increasing the cost of doing business and especially burdening startups. As I read it, the government is asserting the authority to deem any industry as a "critical national resource", and then come in and require that your industry adopt the practices that THEY prescribe to HELP you secure your resources against attack.

This seems to be directed initially at power plants and water supplies. But the stated list of industries includes virtually any business in the US.

I am certain that the largest business and monopolists will make a killing in receiving the benefit of subsidies and reduced competition under this order. But it is just one more barrier that new firms have to hurdle to enter a market.

I would be very surprised if the (US) government were to try to "shut down" Bitcoin. Perhaps regulate it. Perhaps harass an individual entity using Bitcoin.

I believe we have a protected right to use technology like Bitcoin. To make it illegal you would have to deny me the right to:

    1. Free communication/speech.
    2. Identify myself (authentication/digital signatures).
    3. Retain private information (keys).
    4. Trade with other people.

The government has an interest in requiring me to report Income so that they can check if I've paid my taxes. But this is no different than any other cash or barter transaction.

It would require a very restrictive police state to outlaw the use of Bitcoin as a technology.

You're confusing "clients" (or Bitcoin nodes) with miners. All clients share information about pending transactions through a peer-to-peer network. A small % of those clients are also mining - incorporating (or not) transactions into a block and attempting to find a sufficiently rare hash value.

Since most mining is done in pools, there is quite a concentration of power in pool operators; if they want to ignore certain types of transactions, they can just omit them from the blocks that they mine.

The real threat is that if any mining pool that had more than 50% of the world-wide hashing power, they could effectively control which transactions would become verified, and which would remain forever "pending". They would accomplish this by ignoring all other mined blocks, knowing that they will be able to outrace the rest of the world in producing the chain representing the "most difficulty".

Ordinary (non-mining) clients can disrupt the propagation of transactions around the network - but as long as you have a possible communication path to SOME miner, you should be able to have your transactions registered in a new block; like the Internet, the bitcoin network has redundant paths to foil censorship from a minority of nodes.

If I didn't know better, I'd interpret MS's actions as trying to drive desktop computer users to Mac and Linux; kind of like their redesign of Office (ribbon) driving people to Google Apps.

MS doesn't seem to be "protecting" it's market share anymore; it seems to want be seen as an innovator, rather than make its current users happy (which seems a very odd philosophy for a company with 90% market share).

The only way I can understand this is to believe that MS is consciously "ignoring" internal usability data in order to push forward an innovation agenda.

On a flight last week I overheard the TSA agent joke about the "torture" procedure he was about to inflict on my son when he opted out of a body scan. I don't find anything about the TSA to be humorous.

Why value uniqueness over simplicity, cleanliness, and learn-ability? When the Mac came out, the primary selling point of the interface was that every application could share a common way of doing things and present it's capabilities to the user.

Bootstrap provides some of this for web applications. I'm not trying to keep my users from being "bored"; I'm trying to give them a simple approachable application where they can get stuff done. A gratuitous re-design serves only the ego of the designer.

No, you use a stolen private key to transfer the Bitcoins to a new public key whose private key is only known to the thief.

My password was randomly generated, has 85 bits of entropy and, it took me only a couple of days to memorize.

We created an online editable version of Google's html5 slides at http://slides.pageforest.com.

I was doing a back of the envelope NPV calculation - 30 years of 0.5% payments -> 15%. Depending in the discount rate, it's less than that; which is why I said "nearly".

It's a sad commentary to think that the best way to improve the system is to pretend to use its services.

It's a compelling story, BUT, are libraries really the best way to solve this social problem? Most tax payers don't realize just how expensive their library system is. In my county, we spend $90 million per year for our libraries - about 0.5% of property taxes. As a home owner, neary 15% of the cost of your home, is being funneled to the library system.

I am very in favor of community public investment, but I am skeptical that our libraries are an efficient allocation of the very large claim they already have on our public taxes.

Note in this story how the grandfather was so poorly served by the system. It's not designed to serve those who need the system most. In the end he only gets reluctant help from someone overqualified (overpaid) to give him the kind of assistance he needs.

Unlike other suggestions in this thread, I do not agree that the answer is to prop up the failing library system by pretending to use its services to make their numbers look better. We should be demanding that our libraries evolve to remove wasteful and expensive services (that many of its users can already afford to pay for directly), and focus on the needs of those who cannot pay.

Our average library staff salary and benefits cost $25/hr - couldn't we double the assistance to the underprivileged by paying trained "Web Assistants" $10/hr to help them instead?

Works great on iPad -- well done!

MRI's have shown that humans are able to do this because of a dedicated site in the brain called "Scott's region". Once activated, this linguistic region is constantly searching for linguistic cues, surfacing signals to our conscious thoughts when the cues are strong enough.

Why is copyright infringement a crime? It seems to me we should be asking Congress to recategorize copyright as a civil matter; companies and individuals would be able to sue for damages, but we should get the precious resources of our police force and justice department out of this dispute.

When someone makes a copy, they do not deprive anyone of their own copy - so it is unlike stealing a physical good. It may cause some harm to the copyright holder, but only incidentally, and with difficult to calculate damages. Rather than have blanket, one-size-fits-all criminal penalties, we should require parties prove the damages in court in order to receive compensation.

Doing so would put MPAA and RIAA back in their place; let THEM bear the cost of fighting infringers of their copyrights - I don't want them sucking up the resource of my government just to benefit them.

too late :-(

I think there is a valid argument that Bitcoin is an asset class, not a currency. As such, governments would have to make possession of BitCoin a crime. I would think any democratic state would find it very difficult to make possession of an asset illegal.

BTW, I don't find Krugman's arguments very compelling, in that they don't account for the nearly infinite divisibility of Bitcoin and unlike gold reserves, notes held against them cannot be fraudulently inflated.

A good book covering the subject is The History of Money (Jack Weatherford). Money was has had a tradition of being valuable in its own right (gold and silver coin), and eventually banks created paper money that represented an amount of gold held in reserve.

The Bank of England, was at first a private entity (established in 1688) and was only nationalized in 1946[1]. The notes they issued were backed by deposits of coin, gold, or silver. They broke with the gold standard in 1931, and it's then we see money tied not to a specific asset, but rather as a debt instrument; it's valuable only because someone promises to pay you back.

When the debtor is a nation-state, we have fiat money, and the money is backed only by the faith and credit of the nation who issues it.

As Weatherford's book points out, fiat currency was not invented by the British, as the Chinese were using a similar system in the 1st or 2nd century, and continued to use a paper money system until 1399. Abuses destroyed the value of the paper currency, and it did not reappear in China until the 20th century.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England

Agreed. The back button is made almost useless since it is stuffed with each intermediate typed character.

While humans will be fooled, the researches have not attempted to fool computers. I would think there would be some simple filtering you could perform on the image to detect the inserted objects.

I seem to remember an Apple earnings call, around the time of the iPad launch, where they disclosed that they were spending $1 Billion+ on some undisclosed manufacturing facilities in China.

At the time it seemed to me that they were investing in touch-display capability to ensure their production demands for the iPad display.

Too bad this is flash based. An html5 version would have been more interesting to me.

Thanks for the link. Amazing show.

I wouldn't worry much now. Natural self replicators abound. The synthetic one described here require very specialized conditions and resources. I think the man-made replication has a long way to go before outdoing Nature.

Very cool idea. Did you notice the patent pending? What's your thought on the patentability of this "idea".

I know when I first saw just the picture of the ball camera, my first thought was, "oh, if you throw the ball in the air you could take a 360 at the apex". I then read that is what they are doing.

So, does the patent satisfy the "non-obviousness" test? It certainly seems clever, but it also seems to me highly likely that this is neither novel nor non-obvious.

The application here is write once, read rarely. Would it be possible to unpower drives once they are full (until needed)?

Two things I don't like about Dart, just from reading the tutorial:

1. Consuctor syntax requires repeating the name of the class when yor define the constructor. So if you change a class name, you have to carefully find all your constructors and rename them.

2. Instance variables in classes seem to be defined at the same level as class methods. Yet one is an instance attribute, and the other a class attribute. So you have irregular scoping rules based on type (data vs. function). This scares me as it indicates functions are "special" and not first-class types in the language.

Naive question. Can the cycle structure of two groups be used to optimize comparison, just as the Poles used in WWII to catalog all the possible rotor configurations of an Enigma machine?