Often astoundingly so. In a recent scandal here, it turned out politicians were redirecting millions of taxpayer dollars for what amounted to chump change.

I take it you are a healthy male, age 18-(say)55 then? If so, congratulations, you similar or better offensive/defensive capabilities of all but the most skilled/strongest unarmed opponent.

However, large segments of the population are not. Consider them before you clamor for disarmament. Also consider the capabilities of a potential opponent should they trivially arm themselves with a knife or some kind of club (If only those darn bad guys wouldn't seek to provide themselves advantage, eh?).

A meaningless correlation. If you banned Goodyear tires, unsurprisingly the number of vehicles using Goodyear tires would plummet yet do you claim there would be fewer vehicles on the road?

"Gun deaths" is a red herring the grabbers like to trot out with depressing regularity.

Cool. Dvorak is to computers what Proudhon is to bitcoin speculation.

Why? That requires "beyond reasonable doubt". We don't.

I have no idea why this Shetab card is supposed to be any different but if you haven't run across it already, this is a useful document http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=37&id=6


Looking at the Shetab page on Wikipedia, it seems like it's more about an inter-bank network for accessing funds and probably doesn't affect the cards themselves. So I'm guessing they more than likely adhere to the standard but I wouldn't be willing to bet real money on it.

Interesting. I have not bought any BTC though exchanges yet (partly for those reasons) so I may have to check them out. I wish Currency Fair would take on BTC as I have had a fairly good experience with them so far.

Oxymoron. The guy who invented the term "Social science" should have had his arse kicked all the way down the road and back.

You could test with play money to see how TA would work for investors not big enough to (significantly) affect the market. TA probably isn't as applicable to the big players anyway as they will be adopting more active strategies.

Security questions are about the dumbest kind of "security enhancement" out there. Especially when they are used as a way to get around a password (I can keep a password secret, I can't keep my mother's maiden name secret and any question which isn't public record is probably easily findable (favorite authors, bands etc) or has been used on a dozen other sites). It's like the people implementing security out there (or at least the people in charge of them) are sheep, only able to consider and adopt the latest fad non-security measure and not able to sit down, read some papers and comprehend and work things from the ground up.

DAMMIT THESE ARE SOLVED PROBLEMS, PEOPLE!!!

Sorry for the rant.

Though with that said, security really shouldn't depend on DNS if it's being done properly. I'd be interested to hear what the actual method of attack was just to see if it's one I've heard of.

I haven't heard the full details but once you have control of a domain name, there's a lot you can do. If you can reset or recover your password with an email, if someone gets the domain, they can redirect all email to that domain to their own mail server. Et voila, they're in. If your site doesn't use HTTPS (and possibly even if it does), there are man-in-the-middle attacks.

It's even not terribly hard to take control of a domain name even without social engineering. Typically, most registrars just require a copy of your DL on company headed notepaper and some trivial other stuff. I've had to do it for domains that were legitimately our company's several times.

This is a good thing. I like my bitcoins going up as much as anyone but for the ecosystem to advance, some of the big holders are going to have to let some of their supplies out to increase liquidity and grow the user-base.

This also counters to a good degree the "rising prices leads to hoarding" assertion.

The economy is a machine with many moving parts, some of which are not immediately (or ever) obvious. Just let it do its thing and it'll work out.

Presumably you want the actual data value from the cards? The format should be standard.

I think it's fairly important. For a long time, but seemingly at an ever-accelerating rate since GWB came in to power, the White house has been adopting a "We can do what we want and not give a damn about laws or congress or the people" stance. It's way overdue that they got called on it.

Of course, this isn't really even a minor speed-bump to that momentum but resistance to it has to start building now (though, again, it's way overdue)

I once considered creating a service which would provide time-locks. Request a public key and at some time in the future the corresponding private key would be made public. Encrypt what you want and leave it wherever public you want. Of course, you have to do some management to re-encrypt things if you're using it as a dead-man's switch but the principle is sound.

After a little consideration though, I decided that the risk from those who wanted private keys released ahead of time just wouldn't be worth it.

That would require them to own that much in bitcoin which in itself would mean the currency was pretty much fubared.

And controlled by a privileged few.

Isn't SOP that the raw resources are the property of the state but they lease the rights to exploit (often for next to nothing admittedly).

Nor I. I wasn't proposing abandoning mtgox either, just that there appears to be an opportunity for someone to take advantage of.