No, the journalist just swallowed the press release verbatim. I mean, there's practically no downside to doing so, and it keeps everyone happy.

Security is a demanding field with a few "rockstars", which means there's a lot of incentive to, uh, exaggerate one's accomplishments. This guy had extended time to pick apart a piece of airplane hardware in his lab, and did so. That's all. What real-world vulnerability does this translate to? We don't know; he can't reveal them at the moment because it would be irresponsible (oh, and incidentally, might also undermine his claims. convenient, isn't this?).

But how to design an organization that can coordinate itself without hierarchy, especially given that it's made of humans used to playing games of master and servant rather than cooperating for common goals? Now that is the trillion-dollar question.

shotguns and anal sodomy. not necessarily in that order.

this is a good guideline, but it's worth keeping an eye open for someone weak, yet brash enough to engage in criminal conspiracy. it's rare and i wouldn't plan on it, but it's an excellent opportunity to make a sideline income and develop a skillset suitable for a lucrative management position. i won't go into detail on the tactics, but they're pretty obvious. keep in mind, you want hush money and an intimidating rep; you don't actually want a confrontation. start with a moderate offer, on the lines of maybe 5% of their salary, and crank that up as time goes by.

btw, start going to the gym now; yes, you can always kill the motherfucker, but it's much, much more effective to passively intimidate them.

and surprise anal!

why the fuck are you asking here, of all places, about office etiquette? haven't you noticed that over half of the people here are bitter, miserable burnouts and misfits?

are you also asking on the christian abstinence forums about finding prostitutes?

The miners can sell the coins as soon as they are produced.

yes, but the production itself takes a long time (and exponentially longer with each one, by design). mining bitcoin is basically taking a long-ish position on bitcoin, as solandri implied. selling the mining equipment instead of using it is basically a hedge; it reduces risk. a rational portfolio would include some amount of both.

so the manufacturers may not be shorting bitcoin, but it seems that they're not very eager to take a long position on it either, whatever that's worth.

yeah, i would. it would be a nice reminder about why not to do business with totalitarian states.

and, yes, i also think that this case is a nice reminder for other countries not to do business with the US for exactly the same reason.

i think it's a neti pot.

yes, the metric is obviously a different thing, but they were both designed for the show.

a few mediocre professors are thinking of using the metric in their courses, but are pretty open about it mostly being a gimmick.

in conclusion, shove it up your bloated ass.

It was designed as a background prop for a TV show. Not a very high bar.

It might be adequate as an artificial evaluation metric for homework in an "Intro to Data Compression" class. It might be, because it hasn't even been used for that yet.

I wouldn't exactly call this a tool. For example, it would be really easy to game this 'score' if there were any significant incentive for doing so. That's usually a bad thing.

oh, come on, you know his brain can only associate one talking point to an issue at a time. you're going to confuse the poor guy now.

it's for lossless compression only.

anyway, you can just add a term representing the lost information and throw it into this "score". hey, why not? just figure out how important the lossiness is relative to compression rate. if it's very important, take the exp() of the loss metric; if it's unimportant (like time is), take the log(); finally, if it's just kind of important, leave it linear, or maybe square or square root. whatever.

seriously, just make some shit up and throw it in. you won't compromise anything. it's already just made-up shit.

The so-called Weissman score is just proportional to (compression ratio)/log(time to compress).

I guess the idea is that twice as much compression is always twice as good, while increases in time become less significant if you're already taking a long time. For example, taking a day to compress is much worse than taking an hour, but taking 24 days to compress is only somewhat worse than taking one day since you're talking offline/parallel processing anyway.

The log() seems kind of an arbitrary choice, but whatever. It's no better or worse than any other made-up metric, as long as you're not taking it too seriously.

put away your 'clever' strawman and grow up. mathematicians do, in fact, think of all of these things. i know several mathematicians working in statistical mechanics as well as others doing binary static analysis. rigorous, formalized thinking helps with almost everything. the halting theorem is an old, essential result; no one believes that it's the final word on what's (im)possible.

And before any of you complain, since surgery I can walk fine.

Did you just apologize to a bunch of whiny pricks for being crippled?! What the fuck, man?

I'm glad you got surgery. Thanks for the account of your experiences.