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Excellent read. This is not for a general audience, but helped me get a nicer grasp on the fundamentals technology than I had before without getting too particular in the under the hood stuff.

The "blocks are never final" idea is what I believe has led to some of the proposed 51% attacks on the bitcoin network.

Question: Does proof of work have to be a near 'lottery' system? Obviously it needs to be asymmetric, but are there other good options than hash collision?

A nanorobot is a lot different from what you might think of as a macroscale robot. Most of these systems have perhaps two or three functional states, like an enzyme that can switch more than one active configuration. These are still much much less complicated than even the simplest of viruses.

I could have sworn I saw this submitted already with a high quality tptacek comment, but now it is no where to be seen.

This product is certainly pretty interesting, but it protects you from upward price movement only.

Because the price changes of flights are not the kind of catastrophic loss for which insurance programs make sense it becomes more of a gambling paradigm than an insurance situation. Level Skies's algorithm tries to make them money. In terms of pure dollars you have to make a rational purchase here your expectation needs to be that your planned purchase parameters will be outside their model.

The ONLY way this can be a win for a consumer is if the utility they gain from the satisfaction of having some certainty around price is worth the fee level skies charges because on average you shouldn't expect to make money on the purchase.

A change in price of a few tens-hundreds of dollars in an airline ticket is not subject to the same kind of loss function that makes home owners insurance a smart idea. IMHO.

Certainly a big issue is scale. For example if your company grows sufficiently large, there are people who do not know how at least one of your products works at your company.

You could fix this by partitioning who supports what, but even that won't work completely. Is your accountant going to do support for your enterprise or consumer products?

The retroactive obviousness of it does seem quite incredible. People get hotel rooms to do things they don't want to do at home. AirBnB is a hotel substitute.

I wonder if AirBnB internally had some risk assessment of this.

Microsoft has always been terrible at branding. Is it 'Microsoft Azure' or 'Windows Azure' it is both ways multiple places on their site.

Really out of date. http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N7/tidbit.html

The power of attorney part is a little scary. I understand they really have to handle the whole process to ensure they get paid at the end, but I surely don't take giving someone power of attorney lightly.

Really interesting use case. I'm super impressed with the concept, of automated data generation and gathering and having a common platform for the company. Perhaps the most impressive idea is that the data that is generated appears to be programatically accessible. I haven't worked in a large enterprise that has advanced past unsearchable and poorly indexed excel files that are manually manipulated/updated floating around on shared drives.

This wolfram implementation seems great, but I wonder about a lot of the annoying 'hard stuff' that would occur in a larger environment, handling of permissions different user roles etc.

The best parts are the natural language inputs and inherent connectedness with data. These are going to eventually become expectations that you'll have interacting with computer systems in general.

Having a computer interface that lets you say, find out who in my office is sending the most email, in a one liner is the next logical step. Including and understanding your company / personal data in the way Wolfram Alpha understands its curated data is the missing link.

I'd be really interested in integration with enterprise resource planning software, and customer relational management software for big corps. For web firms an interface to salesforce.com, an interface to your web analytics data, your support ticket dashboard, your web marketing data. I imagine being able to simply ask questions like how does the weather in my customers location impact my conversion rate? Or other poignant questions mixing internal and external data seamlessly.

The best part of this article is that the company was formed from Japanese university researchers to compete in the DARPA DRC. This is a great result for the DARPA DRC that commercial entities are being created just for the competition.

The technology is pretty cool but the concept of kickstartering this is fairly odd to me. Why not try and raise equity/debt capital around the concept of computer vision as a middleware/service?

I would be interested in physical/chemical sciences MRS, APS and ACS come to mind as examples of things with annual meetings which might have best paper awards.

An interesting list. I'd enjoy seeing this in other fields besides CS.

Link appears to be /.'ed (HN'd). CoralCache/NYUD.net doesn't seem to have it in cache. Anyone got a cached page/mirror?

Impressive, but if I think back to some old examples of this kind of stuff, like Johnny Chan (also of CMU)'s headtracking/motion tracking with Wii-motes it had remarkably less data (IR Led points) but seemed to handle the type of usecases presented in the video just fine. Admittedly it uses camera technology rather than just photodiodes, so lumitrack seems to have an edge for things that need high speed/fidelity at very low cost, but I don't know what those applications are.

This video is is in the 'uncanny valley'[1] of webcontent for me. It is not organic but instead is really an advertisement/marketing for 'Sincerely Truman' a marketing firm, just like so many 'infographics' are just blogspam. I think they did a good job on the presentation, and I somewhat agree with the message, but it just has this layer of artifice on it, that makes me reject it. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I don't understand how Prizeo complies with relevant contest related law. You get entries in proportion to the size of your donation, but apparently contributing does not improve your chances of winning. This seems to be a direct contradiction.

From the contest rules:

The winner will be chosen at random using Prizeo's certified random number generator. No payment or contribution is necessary to enter or win. Contributing will not improve the chances of winning. The contest is subject to Prizeo's Terms and Conditions. The prize is non-transferable.

Implying it is not a typo? A somewhat unconventional usage.

Anyone have links to copyright lawyers discussing this? The few I follow online haven't picked up on it. I can't imagine that selling your financial interest in some legal proceeding generally voids your actionable claim and that this must be something special to do with copyright.

Finally read all the the text and most appendices (skipped the definition of terms at the end). Overall I think that this report is very long but unfortunately difficult to process. In the end it, in compliance with its charge, does not propose recommendations but merely provides statements of facts, and identifies critical questions.

The overall opinion I'm left with is that the legal system is incredibly complex, and that MIT's decision to take a position of neutrality and active disinterest in the case while a defensible position made it harder for the administration and others to act. In the end MIT did not identify an outcome it wanted for the process, which is _okay_ but far from world leading, or inspiring. I agree with the sentiment of the report in the conclusion that " Looking back on the Aaron Swartz case, the world didn’t see leadership. As one person involved in the decisions put it: “MIT didn’t do anything wrong; but we didn’t do ourselves proud. "

Update: Still on Part III. I am amazed that people are posting like they have gotten through it all.

Andrew Grosso.

The number of people in this comment thread who have not read this report in detail is outstandingly large. It is a 100+ page document and I've been reading it for longer than this link has been active and I still haven't finished reviewing finely enough to comment intelligently on the contents.

(Offtopic) Is this a common idiom? I've never heard pan of bacon as the end of this kind of phrase before.

[2] in above was a very impressive talk. Mr. Goodspeed appears quite comfortable on stage, although I think his 'antiforensics' was somewhat less interesting than the notion of exploiting the fact that so many USB drivers exist and that flashing device firmware isn't super difficult. Probably a ton of exploits are possible by building device firmwares that behave unexpectedly and have not so robust drivers in the OS. Dropping a stack of malicious thumbdrives with not just evil.exe on them, but actual evil firmware is an interesting concept.

It is not Swartz, but certain (presumably lower case A) anonymous elements of the internet community who have phoned in multiple threats to MIT staff in the wake of his suicide. That is the subsequent violence that protection of information serves to prevent.

Swartz broke and entered MIT private property that is the crime I alluded to in my analogy. (See the matter in Massachusetts state court for details). MIT did not understand the nature of his actions on the wire before involving the Secret Service to assist in the investigation. At that point MIT has no more say in the prosecution. None. It is the United States Government's decision how to run the prosecution.

This is a ridiculous line of argument. Let me re-contextualize with a parallel scenario. Suppose you are the victim of any of crime. Suppose your teenage daughter is the one who actually called the police. Suppose the perpetrator of the crime was an animal rights activist with a large cohort of people with similar viewpoints who occasionally in a mob mentality anonymously engage in violence, or threats of violence. During the prosecution of the crime, the DoJ goes a little crazy and the accused commits suicide. The estate of the animal rights activist wants to release your daughter's bus route home from school, email address, and cell phone number.

Do you file to prevent this information to be released?

Nope. Certain elements of evidence are routinely kept secret from the public at trials and may be kept under judicial seal.