Posts by sisk

Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade

Re: Heff

"all currencies are based on the concept of barter, of a thing _representing another thing_"

Once upon a time that was true. It's not anymore and hasn't been for a very long time. Using the US dollar as an example because it's the one I'm most familiar with, it has been based only on consumer confidence, or 'faith' in the currency, for 40 years now. Despite that, it's one of the most important currencies in the world. Granted that's OPEC's doing, but the cause for the current situation is beside the point. The point is that not only are not all currencies based on something tangible but that some of the ones that aren't are some of the most important in the world.

I'm not suggesting Bitcoin could achieve such a status, mind you. Without the backing of a government its chances of widespread acceptance are pretty slim. It's based on more or less the same thing as the dollar though, which is how well it trades against other currencies. As is the British Pound if I'm not mistaken (though, admittedly, I might be on that point).

The problem is hoarders

When 99% of the currency is being hoarded I'm not suprised that it only takes one large sale to collapse it. It's not the currency's fault really. It's the fact that people who have lots of Bitcoins really have no incentive to use them. There simply aren't enough places that accept them for regular transactions to make it worth while to do anything with them other than trade them for cash.

It's really too bad. I rather like the idea of a digital currency in principle (and yes I would report my income to the IRS). It's just getting harder and harder to like the way it works in the real world. That's even with having already decided not to bother with it months before the mainstream media noticed it.

Nintendo: no DVD, BD playback for Wii U

He's right

"perhaps he thinks we'll all be downloading HD movies by the time the Wii U appears"

I stream HD video off Netflix NOW, as do enough Americans that Netflix accounts for the single largest chunk of prime time internet traffic. I still watch discs occasionally, but not very often. By the time Wii U hits I'm sure the rest of the world will see how profitable Netflix is and we'll be seeing clones in the rest of the world.

Besides, just like with the Wii, the Wii U will play DVDs and posibly Blu-Rays. You'll just have to wait for the home brewers to make it happen.

Boffins brew up formula for consummate cuppa

American tea?

"If you want to annoy a Frenchman, tell him that (contrary to his beliefs) the French *do* have something in common with Americans. Neither can make a decent cup of tea..."

That's because we focus our efforts on the much superior beverage that is coffee, but the French have no excuse.. :)

Ok, that's a joke. In truth, I can drink neither regular tea nor real coffee anymore. I have to subsist on herbal imitations of each and miss them both equally. Stupid caffine sensitivity...

DARPA issues call for notions on Starship-for-2111 plan

Well...

"Or do you have an idea on how to modify the geometry of spacetime just in front of you into a desired configuration?"

Give it 100 years of the same type of exponential technological development we've seen the last 100 years and manipulating the geometry of local spacetime may not seem so far fetched. Granted, it's far beyond us right now, but we're talking about what we'll be capable of in 100 years.

Given the various theories for getting around the speed of light that I know of, the Alcubierre drive seems the most doable to me. Unless, of course, someone figures out how to make wormholes large enough and stable enough to actually use for travel (I don't see that happening).

Not quite

There are several loopholes in general relativity that could potentially allow FTL travel. The best known is the idea of wormholes, but I think a working Alcubierre drive is probably the most likely.

Man says he lost $500,000 in virtual currency heist

Wow

A guy gets ripped off and all a bunch of you have to say is that he's an idiot for having Bitcoins. That's pretty pathetic. It is not the victim's fault. Nor is it Bitcoin's. The system does exactly what it is meant to. The merits and flaws of an untrackable currency are beside the point. Too many of you are playing the 'blame the victim' game. Do you blame the victims of identity theft when a trojan lifts enough personal details from their computer for someone to get a credit card? I would hope not. This is the same thing.

Rogue software consultant's vast stash of DIY explosives

Call me confused

He robbed 4 banks, presumedly with explosives (unless, perhaps, he was making some supercharged fireworks for the upcoming Independence Day festivties?)....so how exactly is the minimum sentence excessive?

Bah...stupid judges with their kid gloves.

Nintendo takes control with next-gen games console

Eh

I really wasn't impressed with the touchscreen on the DS. In fact, I was so unimpressed with it that I still have my SP. I have my doubts that I'll be any more impressed with the touchscreen on the Wii U, but I may change my mind when I get a chance to try it if they do a decent job with it.

I suppose I'll have to wait until one shows up in the local Gamestop and I have a chance to play with it to decide if I'll get one or not.

Stand by for more big, windfarm-driven 'leccy price rises

Seems my figures were wrong.

That's what I get for trusting the Discovery Channel. A documentary I saw on the place had said that all the solar panels provided more power than the city could use. Still, I believe that renewables can, and should, provide most of our electricity.

Seems to me...

the problem lies not with wind farms (which are a fine technology when properly applied), but with the Renewables Obligation Certificates system. You're basically making it expensive to use a technology that should be dirt cheap to run with that system.

As for renewable energy, it's been pretty well proven that it can work on a large scale. Freiburg, Germany is all the proof I need to know that renewables are viable. The first step to actually making them worth while is to shut the scaremongers up. We're running out of non-renewables quickly. By 2020 we'll really be feeling the strain globally if we don't embrace renewables.

Phishers LAMP web hosts

Not very telling at all

Ok...so between 76 and 82 percent of the respondants who got pwned were running at least one part of the LAMP stack....If Apache alone has a better than 60% market share and MySQL also has a pretty significant market share (which it did last time I checked, but that was several years back), isn't it fairly likely that around that percentage of ALL web servers have at least one component of the LAMP stack? PHP is fairly popular as well. Besides, one component of the stack does not make a LAMP server.

US senators draw a bead on Bitcoin

Actually

if my understanding of it is correct Bitcoin is secured by the say so of at least half of the p2p network. At this point you would have to get tens of thousands of clients to agree to let you rip it off. That's a hell of a lot more secure than what banks depend on.

Apple pilfers rips off student's rejected iPhone app

******ing Apple

And people wonder why I refuse to develop for iOS. Bad enough that they reject apps without any real basis for doing so, but here they've clearly stolen (no other word fits) a valuable idea. He should sue.

This is pretty similar to when Ford ripped off the guy who invented intermittant windshield wipers so there'l probably a precadent.

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

Disks are safe for now.

The real money is in the enterprise market. Always has been. The consumer market could completely vanish tomorrow and the disk manufacturers would be fine for a few more years thanks to all those big corporate server rooms with their expensive drives and the desktops and notebooks that all those workers are tied to. That market's not going anywhere anytime soon. Sure, there will be a decline, but it's hardly 'the end for hard drives' yet.

Now give NAND a few more years to improve and THEN you'll see HDD's go the way of the dinosaur.

Movie-goer punts 3D-to-2D cinema specs

It is

3D has severe limitations on both picture quality and framerate. Plus it gives people headaches and kids aren't supposed to watch it because it'll damage their eyes.

All in all, yes, 2D is MUCH better than 3D.

Or....

you could just refuse to pay the extra for 3d and wait for the 2d DVD to come out like I do. That way your can contribute to the much needed and hopefully quick demise of this fad and get back to focusing on technologies that actually make the movies look better instead of worse.

Judge blasts Cisco's 'unmitigated gall' in ex-exec's arrest

News flash

US officials can be easily bought and coerced into damn near anything by rich corporations.

In other news, it seems that the star Sol will be visible in the sky tomorrow except where cloud cover hides it.

Cellphones as carcinogenic as coffee

Cell phone risk

So then the risk of a cell phone causing cancer is right up there with the risk of one setting a gas station (petrol station to you Brits) on fire. That is, non-existant.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go drink a gallon of coffee while yacking on my phone and filling my gas tank.

Oracle drops OpenOffice on Apache, shuns forkers

A bad match

OO and Oracle were never a good match. Oracle is, depending on the context, indifferent to downright hostile to OSS. I cringed at the potential fate of OO when they bought out Sun and breathed a sigh of relief when LO forked. With a little luck Apache will be a better fit. Unfortunately, Oracle kept the all important trademark, so it looks like LO is going to remain the better build for the foreseeable future.

What is UltraViolet™ and why should you care?

Sounds like the got it right....

hold on a second while I call the red man to inquire about the weather in his neck of the woods. I'm certain that either it's snowing and the streets are frozen over in Hell or we're being lied to about how great this is going to be.

Pentagon: Hack attacks can be act of war

Not for long

Our leaders may think war is all well and good, but 'we the people' are getting damn sick of it. Admittedly it may just be in my area, but I think war-weariness was a major factor in Obama's election. I know that several normally hard-line Republicans I know refused to vote for McCaine because they knew he'd just keep the wars going.

Linux 3.0 all about 'steady plodding progress'

Kernel panic?

I have seen two kernel panics in my decade of using Linux. The first was my own dumb fault. Let's just leave it at that and forget the embarassing details (I was very new to Linux at the time). The other was caused by a hardware issue. Niether could be reasonably blamed on the kernel itself.

Submarine seized by pirates turns up in Vegas pawnshop

Ninja pirates?

Heaven help us all if they turn out to be robotic to.

Yanks officially recognise the word 'boffin'

Derogatory?

I haven't felt that geek was a derogatory term since the 90s. It's a term that suggests a certain level of intelligence and understanding of a subject that most of the world finds unfathomable. It's a title I proudly wear.

Boffin, likewise, denotes a person who is very intelligent and has knowledge far beyond that of mear mortals. If it's ever used in a derogatory sense then you should be laughing at the gormless prats with the audacity to misuse such an honorable term is such a way rather than feeling derided by them.

Just my two cents from a Merkin point of view.

Fun with lingusistics

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Silly buffalo.

Drink 8 bottles of wine, you'll be unharmed if hit by Mike Tyson

New sport?

So then can we expect to see drunken boxing go from rarely practiced Kung Fu style to full fledged combat sport?

3D fad fades for Yanks

People wising up?

Maybe people are starting to realize that they're paying more and getting less with 3D. Give me 1080p any time and keep your 3D that can't handle HD or decent FPS counts. The gimmick just isn't worth it.

Osama alive scam snowballs on Twitter

Osama lives

Of course he's alive. That's why we've all seen the video of him gloating over the Navy Seals' failed attempt to kill him.

Oh, wait, we haven't seen that. What in the man's history allows anyone to believe there wouldn't be such a video if he were still alive?

As for interrogating him, there'd be no point. According to the intelligence reports they've let news outlets have he's been little more than a figurehead for years.

Judgment Day prophet resets doomsday clock

He sure did

"now says he simply misinterpreted the word of God "

Yeah, I'd say so. In Matthew 24:36 Christ himself said that even he didn't know when the second coming would be, but this guy thinks he can work it out by reading the scriptures? Why in the world would anyone fall for this the first time, let alone the second or (now) the third?

Harold Camping is considered a nutcase even amoungst Christians, at least the ones I know.

Much better wireless power transmission possible - boffins

+1 For Tesla!

The question is would someone trying to rekindle the Wardenclyffe Tower experiment today run into the same obstacles that Tesla did? After all the reason it was never finished wasn't because he just got tired of the idea.

Apple, Amazon trademark spat turns surreal

O_o

Is Apple serious? The judge is gonna laugh that argument clean out of the court room. Maybe they fell into the Twilight zone or something.

Explosion in iPad factory kills two, injures more

Dangerous iPads

I've been sayin' it. The iPad is a dangerous device. Do you really want to buy a device that's going to explode when it accumulates a little dust? It's nothing more than a terrorist device designed to destabilize the Western world!

I'd put a second Joke Alert icon on here if I could, just to make sure.

PS3s overheat after firmware update

Well

I gotta say that my PS3 is primarily a blu-ray player and DLNA client. I intended to play games on it when I got it, I really did, but most of my games just sit and collect dust now. Ditto for my Wii and PC games and the emulation station PC I built into the case of an old NES. I just don't have the time to sit and play games anymore. If I were to go out and get a replacement for the PS3 now I would DEFINATELY not be getting another PS3.

New PlayStation Network hack hijacks user accounts

PSN Back up?

Huh....shows how much I use it. I hadn't even noticed.

Schmidt: Android will bring DEMOCRACY to the WORLD

Holy Hyperbole Batman!

Seriously, who does he think he's fooling?

EXPLODING MELONS terrify Chinese

Actually...

Forchlorfenuron doesn't fall under 'nasty chemical additive' here. We use it on grapes in the US. The catch is that it should only be used when the plants are very young, on any type of fruit. From what I've read elsewhere the farmers having this trouble are mostly new to growing watermelons (having jumped on the watermelon bandwagon when prices skyrocketed) and didn't realize that.

Agricultural experts NOT baffeled

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110517/ap_on_fe_st/as_china_exploding_watermelons

They put forchlorfenuron on the melons too late in the season. On top of that, the variety of melon is one known for splitting anyway. There are no baffeled boffins here. Move along.

Counter-Strike gamers explore bin Laden bag site

And remember....

when you play Counterstrike, terrorists win.

Microsoft, Nokia, HTC fight Apple's 'App store' trademark

Eh?

How exactly am I a troll? Someone asked for proof that 'app' was in use before 2008 and I provided it. App has been in use to describe applications in general, including mobile applications, forever. THAT was my point. How does that make me a troll? Did you even read the link I posted?

Screw it, I'm leaving. And I'll not be reporting to any fscking bridge.

So what?

So Apple were the first ones to open an app store. Big deal. The argument here is that app and store are both generic terms far predating Apple's use of them (which they are) and that the combination thereof is too generic to be trademarked (which the courts will decide).

@AC 10:44

"Where's the proof of this "established" knowledge? Come on, if it's that well established show us an example before Apple, where the term App was used has the general term for mobile applications.

You better make sure that example was there before 2008 otherwise I'll be ripping your info apart and make you look stupid."

Let's take a look at the wayback machine, shall we?

http://replay.web.archive.org/20030414024326/http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/app.html

I believe that pretty well rips your argument apart and makes you look stupid. Have a nice day.

Didn't I read somewhere...

that Microsoft's lawyers recommended that they accept Lindows' offer to just change their name because they were likely to loose the trademark if the case actually went to court? I can't remember where I read that so it's possible that I didn't. All the same, the term was in common use before Microsoft started using it. By my understanding of the applicable laws that makes it illegitimate.

App store is another case completely, but it seems pretty generic. I'm clueless on what the law says about that, but I wouldn't be suprised to see the courts decide against Apple.

Would putting all the climate scientists in a room solve global warming...

The real cause of global warming...

is obviously politicians, lawyers, and other hot air filled persons relieving some internal pressure.

Use of Weapons declared best sci-fi film never made

I was thinking it

When the second place book has 10 times the votes of the third place book I have to think that there were a couple of competing scripts.

Facebook caught exposing millions of user credentials

What, again?

I've got this one figured out. Facebook is working on making the leakage of Facebook user details so routine that it's not news anymore. Then no one will ever know when they sell user details. It's all part of thier diabolical scheme to take over the world. BWAHAHAHAHA!

YouTube comes clean: Content rental is king

Cool

"Older titles will be free, but ad-supported."

Hey, works for me. The question is what do they consider 'older'?

Ten... fantasy gadgets you wish you owned

Some disagreements

Peril glasses? Really? All the cool toys from the imagination of Adams and you pick the lame peril glasses? What about the infinite improbability drive? Or the SEP cloak? Or maybe one of the various devices designed to distract you so that you miss when you throw yourself at the ground? Or, heck, even the guide itself (an e-book reader that can tell you anything about anything and is able to puzzle out what you're looking for from a simple question)?

In Star Trek the replicator is what I'd want to have. 99% of the time they only use it as a glorified microwave, but they show that the things can make pretty much anything. Consider that for a moment. Want an iPad? It's yours as quick as you can say "Computer, iPad". Heck even as just a food dispenser it's freaking awesome, in no small part because it also disposes of the dishes afterward.

Oh, and holodecks would realistically be no more addictive than World of Warc....eh... nevermind.

Some other gadgets to consider:

The sarcophagus from the Stargate shows

Zatnitticas, also of Stargate origin

A tasp from Ringworld

The laser suck-you-into-the-computer thing from Tron

I'll stop now....I could go all day listing the gadgets I'd like to have from sci-fi.

Right here

http://www.parajetautomotive.com/

Not quite as sleek as the ones typically seen in sci-fi, but I do believe it's the best flying car we'll see in the near future. Every other attempt I've seen would be more accurately called ground-driving planes.

Sony mulls hacker bounty offer

Nah

I suspect that if this was a member of Anonymous pulling a smash and grab that they'll go to court without the backing of the legion. Anonymous is all for freedom of speech and protecting consumer rights. I highly doubt that they'll be quick to defend the theft of personal and financial data just because it happened to be done by one of their own. It just doesn't mesh with what they seem to stand for.

Then again they may prove me wrong, in which case I'll loose what little respect I have for them (I usually agree with thier ends, but have major issues with their means).