Doesn't surprise me.  Absolutely craptacular bullshit only thrives in the absence of skepticism.

And this is nothing if not absolutely craptacular bullshit.

Yeah, I suppose the conspiracy managed to put this on ICE's website without their knowledge.

Superseding Indictment

I despised him even back when that book came out.  He actually uncovered the CCC's actions because of his obsession with a $0.75 accounting discrepancy, that ultimately led to the evidence of the intrusions.  Okay, I have to admit that level of attention to detail does display a certain brilliance, but not the sort of brilliance anyone would want at a party.  And despite a great deal of technical skill, he so totally failed to get the Internet and its culture even then, back in the late '80s, that he was basically the symbol of everything I hated.  (It didn't help that I was on the wrong side of the law myself at that time and he was the self-appointed king of Internet cops.)

So when he said that abjectly idiotic shit in Newsweek, I was really not at all surprised.  That was exactly the kind of lame shit he was practically addicted to saying.  He didn't understand Internet culture, so he despised it.  What a surprise.  He still doesn't.

Not really.  If the last two high water marks are any indication, the next will be well over 266, and when it "crashes," it will be to something well over $100.

Amen.  Away with these unholy abominations.

darkmule daily

Told you it was a bad idea ;-)  And yes, I was also talking about the correct battery horse staple one.  The one with the sample sentence from the Brainwallet article in the wiki is pretty similar.

For games you need as close to direct access to the hardware as you can get.  The more compatibility layers you have to deal with, the further you are away from that ideal, and the less cutting edge your games will be.

There's nothing stopping you from installing it on a separate partition or even virtual machine where it has no access to anything outside its own little world.  For that matter, there's nothing stopping you from NOT INSTALLING IT AT ALL.  It's not like it's going to be going around forcibly installing itself on your PC.

Frankly, the SteamOS development has a lot more to do with Microsoft's shitty OS making it virtually impossible to develop on their platform (Windows 8 ), making it necessary for anyone who wants to do any solid game programming to switch to their own platform.  I think it's actually a welcome development for the gaming world, which is already dominated by console games in which the OS is absolutely proprietary.  An OS at least provides some room for third party development.

As for DRM in especially online gaming, that's a battle lost long ago.  Even if it can't be enforced at the PC level, it can be enforced at the server level, and that has been the case for years.

Finally, again, if you don't want it, don't install it!  There are plenty of people who don't have Steam itself and never will for precisely that reason, and will avoid SteamOS just like they avoided Steam.

Wrong.  All addresses are probably unique, to a high degree of probability and it is entirely possible to generate the same address, especially using a method like brainwallet with a poor passphrase, or using a broken PRNG.  There is absolutely nothing other than chance preventing generating the same address, assuming robust PRNG.

I think it's somewhat less, actually, because of the birthday problem.  It's not the odds of a 160 bit hash colliding with one arbitrary address, but with every currently existing address.  The odds are still astronomical but would require estimating the number of currently existing addresses in use.

ETA:  This being the odds of us ever "seeing" a collision.  It's also entirely possible there would be a collision but it would never even be noticed, because either the other "owner" of the address never used it, or because the new "owner" never bothered checking.  (Possible but, of course, very, very unlikely.)

I think he could throw in getting struck by lightning on the way to the convenience store to purchase each winning ticket, then getting struck by lightning again on the way back home, every time, and still be within tolerances.

Incidentally, don't add this address to your own wallet just to test it.  I can assure you this is a really bad idea, because, well. . .just because.

If this is indicative of the effectiveness of the post restrictions, then this is exactly the kind of idiot they're keeping out.

Keep up the good work.

(Yes, I know, I'll stop feeding now.)

This is about the conclusion I reached just from a wild-ass guess.  Unless DPR was investing in some other expensive activities or managed to get swindled himself, he doesn't seem to have spent much.  He lived practically like a monk.  While San Francisco is a pretty expensive place even to live like a monk, it's not enough to put a significant dent in his money.  Assuming he saved his non-expense money, and didn't have any other big business-related expenses (like the hits) that we don't know about, he'd of course still have most of it.

darkmule daily

cool story bro

What rhetoric?  I just listed some facts.  Sorry you find them unpalatable.

Do you think these standards magically just originated from the ether?  Government regulations enforced them.


So why is that EXACTLY what happened when these standards were left to private enterprise?  

ETA:


Yes, other than being true, it's terribly weak.

You picked a particularly terrible example.  Under this idiotic regime, hose connections were incompatible, because they were proprietary, and when a particularly large fire would have required the assistance of other departments, they were unable to do so because they couldn't even connect their hoses to the hydrant at the scene of the fire.

Sometimes, these fires were started by "uninsured" houses.  Because they hadn't paid for the service, of course, the private service wouldn't come to their assistance.  So when one of these went wild, you could very well end up with your house burned down even though you had paid for the service, because your neighbor had not.  And when the fire was particularly large, other local fire services with incompatible equipment could not assist.  (Actually, to some extent, incompatible hose couplings still exist, mostly an artifact of the past situation, but FDs generally cooperate to have adapters available when this arises.)

So in such a regime, I could have fire service, but my neighbors could not, and my property value would still be substantially damaged if neighboring homes burned down, blighting the neighborhood.  This is assuming my house doesn't end up burned down itself because of the fire spreading from unprotected houses.  To get the full benefit of such a regime, I would have to pay for protection for all my neighbors, clearly unfair to me and probably beyond my means.

This is why things like fire protection, police protection and national defense are considered "public goods."  There is no way to exclude someone who refuses to pay from, for instance, being protected from foreign invasion, so someone able simply to refuse to pay would be a free rider on the generosity of others.  Conversely, the refuseniks in a fire protection regime cause damage even to those willing to pay, who then do not receive the benefit of what they purchase.  

Despite the fact that the cost is modest for a reasonable level of fire protection on the individual level, it would be priced exorbitantly if a single or a few individuals had to foot the bill for the protection of all, which is necessary for any effective protection.

I have never seen a rational response from a libertarian extremist as to how to address the public goods problem, or how it would be a good thing to let entire cities burn to the ground because of the refuseniks, who presumably would have these very extremist libertarians among their number.

What hero wouldn't murder someone who meddled with his drug empire?