Recent Posts

3726

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 27, 2013, 10:07 AM »

But really, if it's climbing, who cares?

-Renegade (March 27, 2013, 09:56 AM)

Hmm...what was that you were saying earlier about selling one's soul to Lucifer?

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 27, 2013, 09:36 AM »

I am extremely bullish on this.

-Renegade (March 27, 2013, 08:26 AM)

Really? You think?  

The thing that I find absolutely fascinating about it is the power of the people in a P2P network to create such an incredible market.

It's all been done before. It will all be done again.

Right now we are seeing the Wild, Wild West repeating itself online. It's a gold rush for anyone willing to jump in, get dirty, and start panning, and the barriers to entry are very low.

Yup. It's whats called a totally out-of-control speculative bubble in progress. You can get the same (or better) odd at the blackjack table.

There's an old story (probably apocryphal) about how Old Man Rockefeller was on his way over to the Wall Street Exchange one morning, and overheard a stand of shoeshine boys and their customers swapping stock tips with each other. Stopping for a shine, Rockefeller listened attentively as his boy regaled him with one 'hot tip' after another.

After thanking the boy, and tipping him handsomely, Rockefeller (so the story goes) went to the exchange and calmly and slowly began (so as not to attract undue attention) selling off all the shares in his portfolio over the next three or four days. He then moved most of his money into secure government bonds. When the stock market crashed about a month later, Rockefeller's personal fortune was left largely intact.

When asked what tipped him off the market was going to tank, he said: a shoeshine boy.

Seems Rockefeller reasoned that when professional investors are the main force driving the markets, all is well. But when the speculators and amateurs show up in large numbers, the stock market is in serious trouble. Rockefeller supposedly said: When your doctor and lawyer are getting into the market, it's troubling. But when the butcher, the baker, and even the shoeshine boys begin discussing stock prices, it's time for the professionals to get out.

Or, as short version goes: To avoid injury, NEVER play hardball with amateurs.
 

3728

Living Room / Re: The Ultimate List of Educational Websites

« Last post by 40hz on March 27, 2013, 08:07 AM »

@Stephen - thanks for taking all that in the spirit which it was intended.

3729

Living Room / Re: Google Reader gone

« Last post by 40hz on March 27, 2013, 06:08 AM »

Heise Media UK recently published a fairly extensive article on their H-Open  blog about replacing GoogleReader functionality with currently available software and hosting solutions. Read it here.

For a large number of information collectors and collators on the internet the current challenge is to find a replacement for the Google Reader service. The H's Fabian Scherschel has looked at what functionality made Google Reader popular and what are the current best alternatives to the Reader experience.
.
.
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This article will give an overview of the most popular alternatives to Google Reader that currently exist, starting with hosted services (open source and proprietary) and progressing to self-hosted, open source alternatives, and one rather unique self-hosted proprietary package. Although the focus here is primarily on web-based software, as we are looking to replicate Google Reader's most important characteristics, we have included a roundup of the native open source RSS readers that are available on the Linux desktop, as some users might want to switch to desktop software instead or use it to complement a web-based service. ...

 

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 11:10 PM »

So, in summary... Full on "make Nineteen Eighty-Four looks like paradise".

-Renegade (March 26, 2013, 10:59 PM)

Not so much a paradise as it's how benign it can all be be made to look now that the technology and labor-saving innovations for doing up a '1984' have improved so dramatically in the last ten years!



Even the uniforms have gotten really cool looking...

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 10:54 PM »

@40hz - How could it be shut down? Shut down all encrypted traffic? I don't get how it's possible to shut down like that.

-Renegade (March 26, 2013, 10:22 PM)

Require a license and registration for access and use. Designate allowed forms of encryption. Go super "net nanny" and just firewall out everything other than registered commerce sites and government addresses. Put DNS under direct government control along with a change in methodology for how it works.

The possibilities are endless.

And if push comes to shove you could always just wall off the country ala China/N.Korea/etc. Or shut down the backbone routers and/or DNS servers.

It's doable. Not something you'd want to do right this minute. But long-term, requiring some sort of certificate or credential in order to access the Internet (or its successor) is probably coming. Add locked down computing appliances or NIC cards to the mix and you could make it happen in about 10 years without undue hardship for the average user.

Sad but true. The "good old days" will eventually come to an end for the Internet, just like they have for every new technology once it became mainstream and serious money started riding on it. To get something off the ground, allowing rapid innovation is the main thing. Once it's working "good enough" and widely deployed, the importance of chaotic innovation lessens as "standards" becomes the paramount concern. Finally, once the technology is established and entrenched, standards give way to concerns about regulation after the no longer 'new' technology gets fully assimilated into daily life.

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Living Room / Re: The Ultimate List of Educational Websites

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 10:15 PM »

OK. You've been de-bozoed. Don't let it happen again. (Well ok...maybe one or two more times - but that's it!)

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 10:11 PM »

The control freaks still don't get it. The cat is out of the bag. It's loose. It ran away and they'll never catch it.

The power is in the network and out of their hands.

-Renegade (March 26, 2013, 08:41 PM)

Minor point - "the networks" so beloved by today's would-be cyber-revolutionaries are all built, paid for, owned, operated, and monitored by governments, big telcos, and major corporations. You can't use the Internet without going through a router under the direct control of one of the above 'establishment' players.

I work with networks and network technologies for a living. And believe me when I say the power is not out of the hands of the network managers. You may have the occasional talented rogue user find an open exploit to take advantage of for however long it remains unpatched and undetected. But you can't fight a protracted cyber-battle using such loopholes as your main weapons. And now, with Big Brother in the Desert monitoring all US electronic communications, there is little that can't be dealt with once it reaches sufficient "noise level" that somebody in a position of authority decides it needs attending to.

20 years ago it might have been technically possible to do an end run. That's not really the case any more. Today, the main reason people get away with things online is because there isn't sufficient economic justification to pursue them. Most federal police agencies won't even open an investigation unless they can either cost justify it, or show it somehow has direct bearing on "national security." It's much along the lines of what George Lucas envisioned at the end of THX-1138 when the person the police are chasing is allowed to get away because project cost for his pursuit and arrest has gone over budget by 6%.

But even so, short of establishing a totally separate and independent global data network that's totally isolated from the existing one, you've already lost 99% of the cyber-battle. And now that even the most clueless of bureaucrats understands the power inherent with a global data network, do you really think such an alternate network will ever be allowed to be built?

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 09:41 PM »

And here we survived for 4 pages! LOL

-wraith808 (March 26, 2013, 09:33 PM)

Nah! There's nothing that can possibly be considered offensive here. It's all just politics and economics. Dirty words to be sure - but hardly offensive.

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 09:31 PM »

@Ren - stop shouting. We're all in the same room even if everybody isn't on the same page.

THIS is why BTC is such a threat to the establishment. It puts POWER back in the hands of the people. It RETURNS the rightful power of commerce to the participants in commerce, and prevents the establishment from meddling where it has no legitimate right and doesn't belong.

They will fight tooth and nail on this issue.

-Renegade (March 26, 2013, 08:41 PM)

I'm sure they will.


 

However, they might want to take a page from the civil rights and antiwar movements back in the 50s and 60/70s and stop letting "The Establishment" frame the debate and marginalize them in the mind of the public if they hope to succeed. They're falling for all the same old tricks and set-ups those in power traditionally have used against those pushing for major changes.

Good lord! Doesn't anybody teach headgames (i.e. psycho-political warfare) and agitprop in the radical coffee shops anymore?

3736

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 07:40 PM »

Well...in the end it will be for the courts to decide. I'm guessing the question will at least attempt to come before the Supreme Court someday - although the court would have plenty of ground for refusing to hear it since the proposed new rules basically are only specifically adding "virtual currencies" to the formal list of electronic transfers already covered by existing laws. So it's really only clarifying rather than extending wire transfer regulations.

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Living Room / Re: The Ultimate List of Educational Websites

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 07:31 PM »

Never confuse can with should.

-Deozaan (March 26, 2013, 05:00 PM)

Yeah. Think I'm gonna start 'bozo' filtering Stephen whenever I'm on mobile.

3738

Living Room / Re: Google Reader gone

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 07:24 PM »

Lifehacker recently published a step-by-step on setting up TinyTinyRSS. Read it here.

Syncing RSS Reader with Tiny Tiny RSS and Kick Google Reader to the Curb
Alan Henry   

Yes, Google Reader is going away, and yes, there are great alternatives. However, if you're tired of web services shutting down on you, why not take matters into your own hands? Tiny Tiny RSS is a free, open-source syncing RSS platform with more features than Google Reader ever had, and it can't get shut down. Here's how to install it and set it up.

What You'll Get

Setting up Tiny Tiny RSS requires a little patience, but it's deceptively easy. I had my instance set up and web-accessible within a few hours, and I spent a few more tweaking all of the settings and options just the way I wanted them. At the end of the day you'll have a web page that you can visit at any time, on any device, to read all of the latest articles from the blogs you subscribe to. Tiny Tiny RSS supports filters and labels, so you can organize those feeds into categories, filter out the stories you don't want, and organize them so you read the interesting things first. You can also score feeds, so the blogs you like the most float to the top. There are more features than we have time to get into, but you can read more about them here...

They have an Android app available for it too.

3739

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 07:12 PM »

^Bear in mind theres a big difference between transferring funds as part of a sale, and a simple money transfer. One is ordinary commerce. They already have governing laws in place for commercial transactions.

Monetary transfers are "a whole 'nother smoke." That's what the current flap is about - is bitcoin acting as a monetary transfer agent; or engaging in activities currently restricted to licensed banking institutions; and (now) also serving as a financial investment that is subject to securities regulations? All of those require registration to be conducted legally in the US.

As things stand, I think bitcoin is on fairly shaky legal ground. (In the US at least.)

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Living Room / Re: The Ultimate List of Educational Websites

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 03:37 PM »

Any chance of making it slightly bigger?  

3741

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 03:23 PM »

The government isn't so much looking to catch tax evaders (but that could be a bonus) as much as they are trying to stop money laundering, which supports the drug trade and terrorism.

-app103 (March 26, 2013, 02:36 PM)

Oh, I don't think it's to catch evaders per se either. I think it's more to criminalize one more thing. With that in place, it allows the IRS (and laws with no statute of limitations on them) to be brought into play. Those are powerful "persuaders" when you want to convince somebody to see things the government's way.

What I'd still like to know is if this site will be affected by these new rules. Will this site's donation credits system cause it to have to register as an MSB?

I'd suspect if they can be cashed out for 'real' money the answer right now is: possibly probably maybe.  

However, long term, I think the answer to that question will very likely be: Yes.
 

3742

Living Room / Re: Good for Nick D'Aloisio!!

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 03:03 PM »

Then the Wizard turned to Dick D'Aloisio and said, "So you had an idea, and possibly came up with a minor technical innovation or two, but still haven't received the respect you feel due you? Why my geeky young friend, that's hardly surprising! Unrecognized innovation is almost proverbial.

Now where I come from, we have men called 'entreprenuers.' That's a french word meaning 'opportunist.'

These men posses all the wealth and adulation that were once reserved for those who actually created or discovered great things. And they had no more cleverness or innovative ability than you have. But what they did have was something called 'buzz' - and an entourage..."

 

3743

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 02:10 PM »

So, though they say Facebook credits, does this apply to others also, such as XBox live points, Sony Points, etc?

-wraith808 (March 26, 2013, 12:32 PM)

I think they'll probably mostly restrict it to transactions not already locked into a single company's business like most of the gaming currencies seem to be. Anything that can act as a ready substitute for cash (i.e convertible to real cash - or - broadly accepted) will probably come under the rubric.

Look at it this way - if they're even slightly serious (and in the USA they certainly are) about all Internet transactions soon being subject to some form of state sales tax, you can bet they'll regulate things like bitcoins since you could potentially do an end run around the tax system using them. And that brings up a much more powerful way of going after non-cooperative alternative currencies and their users - TAX EVASION! (That's how they ultimately got Al Capone.)

When it comes to monetary equivalents, governments generally take one of two approaches: (a) regulate it, or (b) outlaw it. Paypal learned about that the hard way early on and decided to play ball with the regulators by getting licensed as needed. But that was easy compared to what Bitcoin will be facing. Because Bitcoin can also be (and is) viewed as a speculative or investment vehicle. So that also will likely make them subject to securities regulations as well as money-transfer or banking rules. And good luck with that. Since there's no central authority or clearing center with a clear line of traceable responsibility, who exactly is going to sign on behalf of all bitcoin? Especially since its decentralized P2P structure is its biggest selling point...

I'll stand by my earlier comment: The reaction was inevitable. The outcome is predictable.

3744

Living Room / Re: Newly coined term, "internet fury"? A sad article...

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 01:50 PM »

As was suggested to the members when using The Well:

              Try not to offend.
    Try not to be so easily offended.

Some of the best advice I ever heard for how to get along with others.
 

3745

Living Room / Re: VPN Gate - Univ. of Tsukuba launches Academic Experimental [Crowd] Project.

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 12:40 PM »

^I'm fairly familiar with OpenVPN on Linux so I tried a few quick attempts last night. No joy I'm afraid. Either with OpenVPN or L2TP. Probably just me forgetting to change a default encryption or timing setting. That or it's just some weirdness with the distro I tried it with. Some repositories leave a lot to be desired when it comes to their network and security package selections. I'll have to look at VPNGate's supplied script more closely to see whats up.

i'll try again tonite if I feel like messing with it. Right now it's running on a Windows "sacrifice box" where I'd probably prefer to keep it anyway. So it's only my Linux-geek bloodymindedness that's providing the motivation to get it to play nice with Tux. Which it should. VPNs are pretty much VPNs.
 

3746

Living Room / Re: Newly coined term, "internet fury"? A sad article...

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 07:58 AM »

There's a HUGE problem with companies knee-jerk firing people without just-cause, or at least without due-process.

-kyrathaba (March 25, 2013, 08:31 PM)

That's an illusion in most states, as most are at-will work states.  For any reason, or no reason at all, you can be fired.  That's why I formerly preferred contract work.  There was no such illusion, and it was more honest, IMO.

-wraith808 (March 25, 2013, 09:46 PM)

Bingo! Spot on the sugar. I've been both an employee and an employer in my state, so I know first hand. Where I am you can discharge, or be discharged, at any time - for any reason - or even no reason at all. About the only thing that may be up for discussion is whether or not the employer has to pay unemployment compensation. And FWIW, the answer is almost always yes - even if somebody was "terminated with cause." (Note: Last thing the government wants is to have somebody out on the street with zero income, and unable to get a job in the future, because they got fired for dishonesty or theft. Think about what that would do to the welfare rolls, and the collateral social problems that would cause, if such  became too commonplace an occurrence.)

3747

Living Room / Re: Good for Nick D'Aloisio!!

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 07:41 AM »

Read the article and what it says he is being paid millions for.
Makes no sense to me.  Must be something more to what he is being paid for.
Then again, very little in this world regarding money makes sense to me so..

-mouser (March 26, 2013, 07:16 AM)

My exact feelings about most of what passes for "business" when it comes to the Internet.

From what I've seen, the clothes have no emperor more often than not.

3748

Living Room / Re: Google Reader gone

« Last post by 40hz on March 26, 2013, 07:29 AM »

Interesting and relevant post here: An Apology To My RSS Readers – But I Had To Do It. (Updated)

It shows that what I suggested (in an earlier post somewhere) is true - i.e., that using Google Reader (or other feed aggregator) meant you could get an idea of a news/post item without going to the web page and without creating any ad-clicks (monetisation). So it is a potential commercial loss - unless you get the user to visit the page - though it is probably great from the user's perspective, of course.

-IainB (March 26, 2013, 04:16 AM)

I find it interesting how so many (who do know better) keep trying to refer to RSS as "creaky" and "outdated" when what they're really trying to do is justify abandoning something quite useful and easy to implement which thousands have found good use for.

I'm glad to see the article brought up the issue of unauthorized content scraping however. That is a serious issue which will eventually put much of what's worth reading on the web out of business if it continues. At least as far as the smaller self-supporting content providers, who try to provide their readers with an experience that goes a basic blog, are concerned. And unfortunately, full text RSS feeds do make it very easy to scrape. There are even horror stories of scrapers filing DMCA takedown notices against the original content creators as a preemptive strike when confronted.

A real problem with no easy solution I'm afraid.

But implying that RSS is "outdated" or "ancient" or somehow in need of abandonment because it "doesn't work" (as some are saying) is more than a little disingenuous. If RSS isn't practical or 'working' any more, it's not for technical reasons. It's for commercial ones.

3749

Living Room / Re: VPN Gate - Univ. of Tsukuba launches Academic Experimental [Crowd] Project.

« Last post by 40hz on March 25, 2013, 09:15 PM »

Just gave it a try over the last hour or so. It's rather impressive. Just confirmed I can watch BBC (which is about all I would want it for) so I'm happy.

Next step is to see if I can use it under Linux.

3750

Living Room / Re: Google data centers

« Last post by 40hz on March 25, 2013, 04:25 PM »

Not sure whether we should replace "Big" with "Scary" or replace "Data" with "Brother".

-Renegade (March 25, 2013, 09:57 AM)

The 'bigness' is not the data center. The bigness is found in its reach.

I had a client that developed an automated web-based business system written in C++ back before most had though to do something like that. It was an automated customer survey system. It cost them about $45K to develop it. It ran on a small "server" (more like a glorified P5 desktop) they built for about $3k. Today you could build one twenty time more powerful for about half that. (Although the programming would probably now run in the six digit range if you were doing it today.)

That little bugger generated at least $20K worth of revenue for them every 24 hours. Still does actually. Just think: a multi-million dollar business running off a homebrew computer. Awesome!

Like burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee so famously said: It isn't how much you got. It's how you use it that counts.