mpyne

34 ms·

481.
by mpyne 11y ago
If your definition of "intelligence community" includes NASA or random low-level soldiers just trying to keep their planned operations out of the hands of their adversaries, then I'd submit that your definition of "intel
482.
by mpyne 11y ago
"Efficiency" is not the thing Bitcoin is going to hang it hat on... Though yes, I'll grant you that Bitcoin certainly makes it easier to avoid financial regulations. So the next time I have to buy rocket launchers or chemical
483.
by mpyne 11y ago
Money is "programmable money". It's like saying that a magic new protocol that inefficiently creates an emergent behavior that resembles the behavior of email is somehow better than just building a web service that does the j
484.
by mpyne 11y ago
And it turns out that China was probably doing this for a year. And that the only reason OPM caught it was because a cybersecurity company happened to be demo-ing their product at OPM that day, which finally explains the surprise.
485.
by mpyne 11y ago
Analogies, to be useful, should reveal internal consistencies between the things being related by analogy. If there are no consistencies between the items in the analogy then the analogy is worse than useless.
486.
by mpyne 11y ago
Well no shit. I've warned parts of the U.S. government that they're "open to cyberattacks". It's obvious even from the outside and has been obvious for years. The surprise isn't that China (or somebody) hacke
487.
by mpyne 11y ago
This is actually (as far as I can tell) the normal way that Congress buts into the actions of an agency. NSA would be covered on a separate budget, and in any event there are at least theoretical reason why you'd want the foreign intel
488.
by mpyne 11y ago
Somehow I suspect that Instagram manages to handle more than 2.7 photos per second, and without each individual photo costing $10 to handle on top of it all. Even a bubble sort will eventually get you a sorted list, but there's a reaso
489.
by mpyne 11y ago
Oh, I'm quite aware. So are the miners, and so are the Bitcoin core developers, who are increasingly starting to think that Bitcoin will never be able to shift completely over to miners' fees as a way of funding the Bitcoin networ
490.
by mpyne 11y ago
The 3 trans/per second limit is an inherent limit in the protocol right now. Fixing that is being discussed but will require a fork (and has already lead to a lot of religious warfare). Even after the fork, the requirements of supporti
491.
by mpyne 11y ago
People were pointing out back then that TCP/IP's deliberate inefficiencies consumed the electrical output of entire countries? Somehow I neither remember that, nor remember ever reading of it.
492.
by mpyne 11y ago
Why? Actually using existing standards would have worked just fine. Making existing standards easier to use might have helped, but the problems in government use of IT extend far deeper than just the choice of crypto standards.
493.
by mpyne 11y ago
Fine. We'll pardon him for the illegal program. And then convict him for the thousands of perfectly-legal programs, after we welcome him back. In the meantime, we should also take steps to ensure that whistleblowers understand the diff
494.
by mpyne 11y ago
> pretty sure he meant any data obtained via methods which would be illegal for a private citizen to utilize should require a warrant. Oh, so the solution is easy then; just make tapping phones legal for everybody again! It might also ma
495.
by mpyne 11y ago
> Anything a normal person would assume is private should be treated that way. Fine, just don't complain when it turns out that your expectation of what is normal doesn't match up with the population.
496.
by mpyne 11y ago
Snowden managed to codify the bulk collection of metadata, help enshrine a bunch of other legal authorities, and burned international cooperation against actual bad guys to the ground in the process. But somehow this all vindicates him? I
497.
by mpyne 11y ago
> No data should be collected without a warrant In your world, are police officers allowed to call in license plate numbers to see if the car of the person they just pulled over is registered to an escaped armed criminal? May the governm
498.
by mpyne 11y ago
Nowhere in that article does it appear that GCHQ actually asked NSA to tap UK citizens' private communications. Is it buried under one of the other links? Instead it appears that NSA had gathered data relating to UK citizens (under NSA
499.
by mpyne 11y ago
> It baffles my mind how fractional reserve banking is even legal. Why? You couldn't let out loans as a bank at all if you had to maintain 100% reserves. Plus how would you possibly enforce that? I can't lend my brother $100 wi
500.
by mpyne 11y ago
> I don't understand why an SEC fine would be against the people and not the entity. Are you sure that it's really not clown shoes? I mean, ordinarily I'd agree that surely no one would be crazy enough to run a securitie
501.
by mpyne 11y ago
> Does the punishment befit the crime. The title says they only got a $20k fine. Am I misreading it? Was this a lemonade stand run by an 8 year old, or by grown adults who are able to use a search engine and Wikipedia?
502.
by mpyne 11y ago
Well, that is very close to the meaning of 'nation', which is why international relations students often talk of the nation-state; the nation is the cultural community, the state is the national-level government. Some nations have
503.
by mpyne 11y ago
His complicity in murder-for-hire was part of Count One of the indictment. The jury convicted him on all Counts. Ergo, his involvement in murder-for-hire has been proven in a criminal court, and I will feel free to repeat that fact ad nause
504.
by mpyne 11y ago
Feel free to grep for 'murder-for-hire' in this document https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391... , where the judge ruled on the admissability of evidence about Ulbricht's atte
505.
by mpyne 11y ago
> By that logic relatives of deceased drunk-driving victims should be testifying against bars and liquor store proprietors as well. Uh, should I be the one to tell you that such relatives often do that very thing? But at least bars and
506.
by mpyne 11y ago
> He wanted Curtis Green dead You should have stopped there. Unless you're trying to claim that Force somehow zombified Ulbricht and then mind-controlled him into placing the hit...
507.
by mpyne 11y ago
He was also charged in a separate jurisdiction, yes, but murder-for-hire was actually a component of one of the charges he was accused of in this trial. Either way enough relatives of deceased drug abusers testified at sentencing, and eno
508.
by mpyne 11y ago
It's amazing to me how people can be pointed to literally where in a charging document you can find where the government actually included murder-for-hire as part of the charges against Ulbricht and yet "people here" can st
509.
by mpyne 11y ago
While it's nice that Force is responsible for the theft and not Green, Ulbricht didn't know that and so can't be given any 'credit' for that mistake. He arranged for his own employee to be tortured and murdered, eve
510.
by mpyne 11y ago
Yeah, I remember reading news stories all the time about how Canadians overdose on maple syrup or how Egyptians overdose on water. Truly, all drugs are just as innocuous as air and puppies.

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