I definately disagree with the idea that adding private security won't remove funding from public security. If the vasy majority of wealthy townships start funding their own private security, it will be much harder to justify expensive policing budgets, and potentially even cheap police budgets.
Short term there are only upsides, but in the long run this will weaken the local governments.
This might actually be a better way to advertise on the internet. My biggest qualm with advertising is that in almost every case, the product being shoved into your face is not the best product for you needs, it's the product with the better marketing plan, which has little correlation to the actual value of the product.
With endorsements, it's more likely that I'll get advertised products that suit my needs, because I'll get more advertised products that people who are similar to me have endorsed.
It still doesn't remove the marketing budget factor, but it may more strongly correlate the things that are advertised to me with the things that best fit my needs.
Similar to the other comments, this seems virtually unrelated to the actual arrest. This article makes it seem as though the single mistake is what allowed DPR to get nabbed, and yet there is a lot more going on in the investigation.
It was a boneheaded mistake but it's not what got him arrested.
I'm always cautious around claims of ADHD. My experiences have been that attention span works largely like muscle. If you practice focus and force yourself to get better at it, you notice improvements over time.
It has also been my observation that you can grow a tolerance to and dependence on ADHD medicine.
I support the author's goal of finding some other solution that motivates him to practice his focus.
"A common misconception is that transactional confidence is based on time"
Transactional confidence is based on the probability of someone compromising the network for enough blocks to undo a spend that you've already honored (IE you gave them what they paid for, then they undo the transaction). At 6 blocks, you are assuming that an attacker won't have the computational power to reverse 6 blocks in a row.
When blocks come out every 2 hours, that means you need to find every single block for 12 hours, or essentially control the blockchain for a long time.
When the block rate is down at 5 minutes, you only need to control the network for 30 minutes - you have more chances to get lucky and undo 6 transactions in a row in your 12 hours of purchased computing time.
A halved block rate does not mean you need less computational power, but it does mean that computational power is probably cheaper and 6 blocks worth of power is going to be more affordable.
Unless your purchased compute time is more than 50% of the network your odds depend mostly on the number of confirmations and not the time they take. The cost of a sub-50% attack increases exponentially with more confirmations but only linearly with longer confirmations, so the number of confirmations is more important.
5 minutes is still a perfectly acceptable block time. It only gets problematic as network latency can be significant in block discovery chances. This happens under a few seconds per block.
There are alt-coins working with 1 minute blocks and they behave just fine. Provided hash power is spread among the network, there is absolutely no problem with this, and it won't be long until we go back to 10 minute-ish blocks.
A successful attack requires more than simply reversing any 6 consecutive blocks. It requires reversing a specific set of blocks containing a transaction one wishes to be reversed.
This is why 5 minute blocks are virtually every bit as secure as 10 minute blocks.
I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera. Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.
Not to say that we shouldn't move forward with hyperloop, or at least build a proof-of-concept somewhere. At the proposed price for hyperloop, you could replace all existing Amtrak transportation in America with a hyperloop and still pay about the same amount for a ticket.
>I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera. Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.
I think the article and even you underestimate the impact of smart phones and mobile devices. There has been an incredible windfall of technologies, financed by the exponential growth of the smart phone market:
* Power saving microprocessors
* Ultra high resolution display technology
* MEMS sensors
* High power density batteries
* Many layer PCBs
* Size reduction of passive SMD components (0402 and smaller)
* High rate wireless transmission
* High fracture strengths glass
And many more I am probably forgetting.
All these technologies enable innovation in smaller markets that would otherwise not have been able to finance this incredible development.
For example Quadrocopters, cheap drones sold as toys but stuffed with incredible technology, would be multi-million secret military projects without the smart phone industry.
I enjoy having a search engine in my pocket (though I'd prefer if it weren't Google), and the ability to haul a stack of 600 and counting articles, and a few score books, while nary putting a crease in my chinos.
But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.
If you were to look at the inventions and advances of the last quarter of the 19th and first quart of the 20th centuries, I suspect you'd find a few more significant items than smartphones: electric light, telephones, phonographs, radio, television (just under the wire), indoor plumbing (made possible by central heating, so your pipes wouldn't freeze), air conditioning, and even the first practical computers. Oh, and airplanes.
If you had the choice of technology since 1925 or before, I think you'd go with the latter choice.
> But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.
Convenience is a big deal. There were books before the printing press (and if you want to argue that they weren't like printed books, then you're invalidating the premise of your argument that the books, telephones of a century ago are like the smartphone ones we have today), and all the printing press did was add a certain degree of convenience in their production, dissemination - and this was a big deal.
"But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable."
Or as fast, or as comprehensive, or as cheap per unit of accessible data, or as connected, or as quick to improve and update, or as multi-functional, or as useful, and so on.
It's the difference between having "food" as a barbarian in 10,000 BC and having an integrated and highly advanced system of feeding an entire civilization of 300 million people. That is to say, the difference between night and day.
What had a bigger impact on the availability of information? The laptop / tablet and Google, or Gutenberg's press?
Prior to Gutenberg, if you wanted a copy of something, it had to be copied out by hand (often with errors introduced). Copies of a great book might be numbered in the double digits. Newspapers didn't exist. Few people were literate, let alone possessed a library. By the 19th century you had penny dreadfuls, mass-market novels, and literacy rates in some countries approaching 100% (Sweden, Finland, and Estonia in particular -- England as late as 1843 had a literacy rate of 67% among men and around 55% for women).
The marginal benefit of additional technology, as with all marginal returns with stunningly few exceptions (Moore's law chief among them) is increasingly low, while the costs of its discovery increases in real energy terms.
You might be able to replace some of the long-distance Amtrak lines with such a system, but over half of Amtrak's ridership is on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. Those trains make stops at all the major cities (and some minor ones) along the way. This is why the "Acela Express" is high speed in theory only. In order to keep the same ridership, any new train would have to do the same thing.
Yeah, replacing all trains is impractical in densely-populated areas that are already well-suited to classic railways, but Hyperloop would make it possible to see similar numbers riding to and from central states.
Also, I bet NYC-Washington or NYC-Boston hyperloops would pay for themselves in two weeks.
You don't seem to be taking into account that a much faster and cheaper train would vastly increase the ridership between any two points. If it was $30 and half an hour to downtown LA, I would visit my brother down there every other week. As it is, we see each other every few months.
The social networks of the future will have the potential to access all of your daily interactions via your smartphone. They have the potential to know who you call, who you meet with, and where you hang out.
This enables your social network app to keep up with your relationships, without you needing to tell it that X is now just an acquaintance and Y is suddenly an important person in your life. In fact, your app might figure those changes out before you do.
Even under the threat of panopticon, these advancements are attractive.
This paper offers little with regards to future steps to protect your data, and basically accepts that we must give all of our information to corporations, and protect ourselves by improving our government.
But future technological advancements can help us escape giving our data to corporations. Imagine using a bittorrent style service to back up your (encrypted) files instead of drop box. Imagine using freenet to back up your files. Imagine using bitcoin to replace credit cards. Imagine using a mesh-network to avoid centralized ISPs.
A lot of these technologies aren't practical yet, but are moving forward. Changing the govenrment will be a long, slow, painful process. While we are waiting on the bureaucracy, we can work to advance decentralized technologies that will help put privacy back in our own hands.
Bittorrent tracks every IP address you interact with. An FBI-planted "seeder" or even FBI-controlled "peer" can prove which IP addresses are downloading or uploading illegal material.
Every transaction in BTC is _forever_ recorded into the public ledger. Every, single one. BTC is a goldmine for information, and is hardly private at all. Pseudo-anonymous is as close as you're gonna get, and after one transaction, your BTC wallet will forever be associated with a particular purchase.
The mesh-network is the closest idea you've got... but at the end of the day, the ISP is the weakest link. You're connecting to the internet somehow, and that means trusting Verizon, Comcast, or whoever to keep up with Network Neutrality. If Verizon / Comcast bans (or degrades the performance of) Tor nodes, and if ISPs hellban Tor nodes, then the system dies easily.
The first step to creating progress is to understand the current limitations of systems, and understand why they would or wouldn't work.
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Also, COINTELPRO and Project SHAMROCK. Public/private partnership has existed for an extremely long period of time. The political solution IMO is the most logical one, as it stopped Project SHAMROCK before, as well as Nixon's abuses of the government intelligence system. What was the FISA court created for, and is it effective at it's job? What has changed since the 1970s implementation of the FISA court? What are the citizen's responsibilities of the FISA system?
A key is fully understanding politics and US history, which the typical American is unfortunately extremely ignorant about. If you don't like the current situation, then learn a little history, learn a little politics, and do something about it.
EDIT: The answer btw, is to be aware of the "watchdog" systems that have been built into our democracy. The watchdogs are the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As I've stated in my previous posts, the members on these Committees are charged with creating and drafting laws, and have full Top Secret clearances... and the ability to investigate any intelligence agency they so please. These committees were created in response to previous abuses (ie: see the projects I listed above), and are staffed by bipartisan groups.
Why were Senators like Wyden and Udall ignored when they were extremely vocal of these programs before? Were Americans just ignorant on these issues? Did people not care? Do people not realize the importance of listening to Senators / Representatives?
You could definitely use BitTorrent sync securely for personal use, like DropBox. The issues with illegal downloading are totally separate. If you are downloading a public torrent, you join a swarm and upload pieces of it to others, where they can see your IP address. If you are just syncing your files with it, no one else joins the swarm.
Anecdotal evidence is not scientific, but this makes a lot of sense in the context of my life. At work, when I hit a tough problem, I'm much more likely to tab over to HN or reddit, yet I've found that somehow I manage to hit the deadlines at the same pace regardless of how much I force myself to focus.
I do think though while you might be drawing from one 'pool', it's a pool that you can work to expand. To me this seems to be the same vein of psychology that makes ADHD medicine ineffective for kids on the long term. There's one pool of resources you are drawing from but like muscular strength you aren't doomed to your current limits.
Yes! My pool was quite drained 1 or 2 years ago, but I managed to enlarge it by taking longer breaks, shutting down completely on weekends, eliminating foods I'm intolerant to (gluten & lactose inflame my gut pretty quickly), introducing intermittent fasting (no food until noon), adding fish oil and vit D, switching from cardio to HIIT workouts, and keeping caffeine intake constant. I can now be highly productive for at least 7-8h per day, and then still focus on my family (vs turning into a couch zombie). Lack of sleep (< 6h; optimum is 8h) still kills me though.
I think intermittent fasting and fish oil did the most for me in this regard. Since quality of sleep is really important to my focus, it might be worth mentioning that zinc supplements do a lot for me here (but at least this remedy is purely anecdotal).
Their support is totally abhorrent though, be prepared waiting days/weeks instead of minutes/hours for any support at all, they abruptly change your TOS and server specs without telling you, cancel you order for no reason without telling you or even refunding you etc.
They're totally horrible to deal with, unless you make minimum wage you're probably going to spend more on packets of Tylenol due to all the headaches they cause than what you're going to save.
Indeed. I ordered a Kimsufi server five days ago with a guideline setup time of 24 hours. Placed the order, made payment, no doubt I'm already paying for the service, but five days later, I'm still awaiting setup.
Their ordering process is painful. Their online management interface is atrocious. Communication is poor.
"no doubt I'm already paying for the service, but five days later, I'm still awaiting setup."
I'm a long time OVH customer and I can ensure you that your contract term will start only when you get your server.
As far as I know the first 1000 "3euros" servers got sold faster than they thought. Now they are building new ones. Be patient, your server is coming. ;-)
Bandwidth is more important than space to me, so Online is still much better. And as soon as they will have matched OVH's new prices there are going to be THE best host.
Short term there are only upsides, but in the long run this will weaken the local governments.