A long while ago Yahoo tried to compete with eBay offering YahooAuctions. Their heart wasn't in it, and they killed it off. The potential there was huge and because there is no competition, eBay has enjoyed enormous profits at the expense of anyone trying to sell stuff. The commission they take off every sale is huge. Yahoo could shave the commissions down just a bit and still make a healthy profit.

Oh, and it would be trivial for Yahoo to make a craigslist competitor. I wish they would. Heck, with flickr, they've already got the photo hosting set up. Users would be attracted by improved interface and excellent mobile buying and selling app. At present, Craigslist doesn't care about either of these things and deserves to be knocked off its laurels.

Back in 2005, I had a personal blog site defaced. I didn't even know it had happened.

The way I spotted the issue was through an open terminal window that was tailing the apache access log. I'd glance at it every once in a while as traffic trickled over the blog. I saw a request come in from the PENTAGON domain. I thought it was odd because my blog was about skateboarding and didn't think it would be of interest to anyone working at the Pentagon. I looked at the referrer and it was a site I was unfamiliar with: http://www.zone-h.org/.

So I browsed over to that server and saw that the page linking to my site was a list of defaced sites. Then I checked my own homepage and sure enough, Wordpress had been compromised by an exploit and someone had posted an article on the front page.

So, it seems like someone at the pentagon had a script scraping the defacement indexing sites and was then visiting each affected server and scraping that. Never got an email or phone call or anything.

Wow. John Carmack quit his job at iD (Zenimax) to be the CTO at Occulus Rift and then in less than six months is probably getting a few dozen millions of dollars.

Talk about knowing where to be at the right time....

Same with Marc Andreesen and his VC cash infusion of $75 million just a few months ago. Those guys are going to turn that $75 mill into a bunch more through this turn and burn deal. Not so much a 'burn,' but it is a very quick harvesting on their investment.

Knutsi- I agree with all your points, but wanted to extend your comment a bit.

Probably that last line is the most significant motivator for both parties--

For Oculus, Sony was raising a threat. Also, supply of displays from Samsung might prove to be an unfeasible constraint. Especially if Samsung decides to create their own VR googles. With FaceBook money, they can build their own OLED factory if need be.

For FaceBook, they have to really worry that a technology on the horizon might take their hundreds of millions of eyeballs off FaceBook html and point them in a different direction- just like FaceBook took eyes away from network television. They just bought what might have been a FaceBook killer in the future. Maybe they aren't planning to weld Oculus rift onto the FaceBook homepage. Maybe they'll let it crush facebook, but they won't care because they'll be riding on top of the beast that stomped it to death.

Awesome work here.

I used to play the old Robot Wars game on my Apple II+ as a kid. Super fun and that was basically requiring us to write in assembly. Glad to see someone has brought this type of competition back to the public. Major kudos!!

I'm curious about the choice of javascript. I personally don't have a criticism against javascript, but I've recently been working with beanshell and python, so I'm wondering what's driving the javascript decision. Plans to support python or other languages later?

The pings that were recorded after the other communications gear was shut down were emitted by the Rolls Royce engines. The engine vendor apparently wants to maintain records separate from the black box (might not be recovered) in the event of a crash. This way they can document exactly when their engines stopped. If it's at point of impact, then they avoid blame.

So, I do not believe that anyone inside the plane could have shut off the engines' transponders without shutting down the engines.

Slashdot's Tim Lord managed to get in....

I'm assuming this reference to the attendee was missing a letter 'e'. To clarify, this Slashdot staffer is the guy who uses his mystical powers to delay all postings a few days after they've appeared on news.google.com. When people say they don't believe in Time Travel, this guy shows them how to send articles into the future.

The dots are starting to connect now, aren't they?

What makes his so-called stash of bitcoins worth the effort of trying to go after him for a cut any more than how wealthy any one of the other multimillionaires or billionaires in the world happens to be?

This is pure speculation, but that's all we have to work with right now.

Nakamoto has worked as a scientist on several secret military projects. This has given him some insight into the ongoing US government research into time travel technology. He must know that by attaching his own identity to the creation of bitcoin, he would become a lucrative target for criminal time travelers. By keeping his identity anonymous, he was protected against time travelers visiting him on the day he created the algorithm and having it stolen from him.

Here's the difference.

If a gang of thugs captures Warren Buffet, there's not a lot they can torture out of the old codger. It's not believed he has secret knowledge that may be worth billions of dollars.

There could easily be foreign criminal syndicates who could suspect Nakamoto knows a secret backdoor to the algorithm that can be exploited to easily generate bitcoins. The potential riches might be incentive for them to gamble a kidnapping and torture operation.

Lots of wealthy people DO hire security to accompany them in public places. Remember the false-flag conspiracy theories about the private contractors standing around the finish line at the Boston Marathon during last year's bombing? Those guys were security hired by wealthy people running in the marathon. The risk of kidnapping does exist for people in the US. Patty Hearst can corroborate that.

Dan,

Doublecheck your math to decide whether it's more lucrative for the inventor to cash out now or sit on a stash of $400,000,000 worth of bitcoin.

Even if they devalue down to $1 each, he is still sitting on $800,000.

Paying 50% in taxes would leave him with $200,000,000. Your proposed scenario fills his pockets with $800,000.

Also consider that he's a scientist who works on military contracts. With secret clearance and California cost-of-living inflated salaries, this guy is already pulling in paychecks of over $300,000 per year.

Your scenario of pulling in an $800k payday probably isn't very attractive to him.

KTK= Kidnapped Tortured Killed

The bitcoin creator was smart to try to hide. I'm surprised he didn't do a better job as he seems to understand the myriad concerns of surveillance, secrecy, etc.

Ok. So yeah. MtGox was coded in PHP and it was compromised recently in a high-profile incident.

And look at MtGox. What was it coded in? PHP!

Sure, some people lost some bitcoins. But what are those?!?!? Intangible sets of numbers and letters that don't exist in the real world. Not to be insensitive, but boo-hoo!

The bigger tragedy here is that the MtGox site had a vulnerability that has probably been exploited for more than a decade by some nefarious organization to steal peoples' Magic The Gathering Cards. These things exist in the real world!!

I'm no friend of trucks, but I wanted to clarify that 80,000 is the typical maximum weight allowed for a semi-truck. That would more likely be a shorter-haul truck moving gravel or other materials instead of less dense cargo like Walmart products. For the long-haul, materials are transported by train.

While these road taxes are an interesting dimension, the main reasons Walmart's products are shipped via truck is because they don't want their own restocking schedules limited by train schedules. If efficiency were to dictate their logistics, the large Walmart regional warehouses would be located on a rail line and trucks would distribute the short haul from the regional warehouse to each store. Oh, well.

To reiterate, rail line maintenance expenses are not pushing Walmart cargo onto trucks. If those fees were so high, low-margin materials like gravel and sand would be in trucks and not hauled via train across multiple states.

Spork--

I'm right there with you. I'm no fan of Whole Foods or homeopathy. I wanted to bolster your point a bit...

When you absolutely know that your products do not do what they claim to do

The trick here is that the packaging of these products cleverly avoids ever providing any guidance for usage. It never lists 'indications' like a traditional pharmaceutical package. These products are packaged advertising the contents, and that's it.

Believe you me, if they crossed that line and promised that this product is an effective treatment for this malady, then the FDA would crush those companies into tiny pieces that could be taken orally or rectally. Instead, the promotion of these products is performed by acupuncturists, herbalists, and other quacks who fly under the federal government's radar.

Whole Foods isn't the witchdoctor, it's just the enabler for the witchdoctor's patients.