Sure, but as far as intrinsic utility is concerned it doesn't matter when I get involved with bitcoin ... well, in fact it does: right now the price instability and general uncertainty mean it is far better to not get involved, wait for all this nonsense to sort itself out and join the game once everything is settled, stable, and bitcoin is actually being used purely for its intrinsic utility. In other words, it's better for me to ignore it for a few more years at least.

I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it. The reported result sounds like a mildly interesting result that happened to pop up in the first pass.

Given the advanced tools available these days for graph mining (largely developed for social network analysis among other things) I suspect some rather more interesting results may start coming out soon. What may seem hard to track on an individual basis may fall somewhat more easily to powerful analysis tools that get to make use of the big picture. I bet there's some interesting info on cliques and exchanges that could be teased out by serious researchers with some decent compute power at their disposal. Pseudonymity may be even weaker than you might think.

Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.

Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then trouble may set in.

* significantly here means, say, double digit percentage change in price every minute. Bit coin is a long way from that currently, but is headed in that direction.

Being primarily a mathematician and not a computer scientist or engineer I've used Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Magma and R. I've also programmed in Python, Perl, C, and Java and dabbled in things like Lisp and Haskell.

All the "math" programs on that list are terrible programming languages; they work great as interactive environments for doing (potentially symbolic) computation, but writing code in them? Ugh. If I actually have to write scientific computing code it's going to be in Python using numpy and sympy, or C if I need performance.

All the different math programs all have their strengths and weaknesses: Matlab kicks the crap out of the other for anything numerical or linear algebra related, both for ease of expression and performance; R has far more capabilities statistically than any of the others -- data frames as a fundamental data type make that clear; Magma is incomparable for the breadth and power of its algebra, none of the other come remotely close; Mathematica and Maple are ... well, sort of a poor jack of all trades that do most things but none of it very well.

A lot of 'desktops' these days are things you don't see immediately; the toolkits, internationalization/localization, canvases, setting centralization and management, advanced font handling, notification plumbing etc. that most GUI applications make use of these days (from one desktop or another). Presuming you're using apps other than xterm (and perhaps you are not) you are actually making use of most of this stuff; the part of the `desktop`you`re not using is simply the window manager and the panels which are, ultimately, the tip of the iceberg.

ATF uses fake drugs, big bucks to snare suspects

You know what the US government won't do for that same individual? Ensure they have a decent education, a basic level of care for their mental and physical health, a safe neighborhood, and a real shot at becoming a contributing member of society even though that would cost less than convicting them of thoughtcrime and throwing them in prison for fifteen years. Instead we pay for some kitted out machine gun-toting pigs to play cowboy rather than policing the streets like officers. Not incidentally, they're too chickenshit to get out of their cars in a lot of those neighborhoods. Yet they still collect their paycheck and their pension, live way out in the suburbs to avoid the desperation they help create with their cowardice, and pat themselves on the back for being heroes.

Now imagine you're an immigrant, or an Iraqi, Yemeni, Afghani, or Syrian. You're worth even less than a citizen. You're trash. You're not even a speedbump on the way to some policy goal rooted in geopolitical theories that have been dead to the rest of the world since the 80s. The kind of policy that sends a million troops and five trillion dollars to a sanctioned, isolated nation, and ends up destabilizing the entire region, massively aiding Iran, and stoking tensions between Shia and Sunni, all while avoiding a single hint of punishment for Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where all of the funding and most of the terrorists for 9/11 came from. Oh, and as a plus: where al Qaeda was unheard of before, they now have another weak state to operate from. Brilliant.

That's why the rest of the world despises the American government. It's not our freedom. It's our complete lack of principle, abject hypocrisy, and massive state violence that they hate. And with our apathetic political landscape, they're beginning to tire of Americans individually for being lazy, ignorant, wasteful, and greedy. We just sit here and take it; a nation of lolling toddlers waiting on the next innovation in fast food and reruns of Pawn Stars while our wealth is squandered in military adventurism that has killed millions of innocent people in only five decades.

PRISM is just icing on the rotting carcass that once was America, and our allies are starting to look towards the exit. Our government has taken another step on the road to fascism and failed statehood: it has declared unlimited surveillance and assassination rights over every human being on the planet; it has declared war on the truth, and it has promised (and delivered) punishment for anyone who dares to speak it. Despite that, the same throwaway phrase about America not being the worst country in the world is still technically true, if you're not allowed to consider how it treats non-citizens. But if the best thing about your country is that it isn't Somalia, do you think there are a few things you could work on?

Anyway. There's my two minutes of well-earned hate for the state of democracy in America. Enjoy the decline.

For users new to the world of UNIX editors Emacs supports the simpler Vi emulation via

(setq global-map (make-sparse-keymap))

which faithfully emulates a novice user's experience of vi.

Mozilla has said this is something you can opt out of, so it's no worse than blocking cookies etc. (and, in fact, is probably easier).

Looked at the right way, this is almost exactly that. Presume for a moment that it works (a big if) and advertisers take to using this instead of pervasive tracking. Now we're is a place where we have a single central point of data release to advertisers; you can turn it off; you can potentially drop in a plug in that publishes a hand-crafted/approved list of "interests" instead of mining your history for it; etc. If it works it does give more control to users over their privacy.

The reality is that information is currency these days, and people will mine for this sort of data because it is valuable. You won't have much luck just blocking everything because the incentives to find a way around whatever blocks are put in place are high. So, assuming information is going to be given, trying to give the user more control over what information is handed over seems like a good thing. I doubt this particular plan will actually work, but I expect something along these lines will happen eventually.

It could work; it's not sending any data that couldn't be extracted from your history anyway (which they are largely getting now via blanket tracking) so it's not especially detrimental to the user. On the other hand it is essentially doing the data mining and summarisation that the advertisers are going to have to do on the client side ahead of time. Getting your product to do some of your compute work for you may be enough of a carrot to get advertisers to end up taking this is preference to all the raw data collected by pervasive tracking.

I don't think there's much in Java the language that encourages over-engineering; it's more in the community that surrounds Java. It's in the tutorials, and books, and code examples and discussion groups . It's in the frameworks and libraries.

The reality is that a "language" is as much shaped by the community that grows up around it as by the actual language itself. Perl doesn't have to be particularly unreadable, but the culture that grew up around perl in the late 90's that was obsessed with cute hacks, fewest keystrokes, and self created obscurity created a state where anyone learning perl was immersed in that culture and came out writing a lot of unreadable stuff. It is my understanding that since many of those programmers left perl for other languages perl has been remade as "Modern Perl" which is largely the same core language, just with a different and libraries, and is quite readable.

Conversely python can be made quite diabolical (just through together chains of nested list comprehensions and single character variables for example), but because it grew up with a culture of "one obvious way to do it" and readability most code you'll see tends to eschew such things, and strive to read like pseudo-code. Again, there's not that much inherent in the language, it's the cultural conventions surrounding the language that enforce much of that.

Java fell in with the Enterprise crowd, and consequently found itself immersed in a culture obsessed with design patterns and over-engineering. Had things gone a little differently with, say, in browser applets somehow becoming the primary driving force for java (let's assume they ran better say) then I doubt java would be known for over-engineering.

No spatial variation is treated as spatial variation, but the central limit theorem still applies wrt the mean temperature over spatial variation. Temporal variation is treated as temporal variation, but when deteermining the mean over a time period the central limit theorem stil applies and gives greater accuracy for more measurements over a time period. Etc. Apply a little bit of common sense.

It's called the Central Limit Theorem. Suppose you have some independent random variable with mean mu and variance sigma squared; CLT says that if you take n observations (X_1, ..., X_n) from the random variable then the sample mean (X_1 + ... + X_n)/n tends to be normally distributed with mean mu and variance sigma^2/n. It is a very well established and formally proven theorem of basic statistics.

Now, how does this apply to large error bars on individual temperature observations and fractions of a degree on global warming estimates? Well, let's start with trying to figure out the temperature on some particular day 100 years ago. We have records of it. Those records are not especially accurate (to within 2 degrees of the actual temperature say). Well, that means that the records are a random variable with mean equal to the actual temperature and variance related to the margin of error on the observation (we are randomly a little high, or a little low), lets call if e for "error". According to CLT if we gather n such records and take their mean then that mean will have a mean of the actual temperature and a variance of e/n; that means if we actually reduce the margin of error of our estimate by gathering multiple different observations and averaging them. Thus, despite the innacuracy of any individual measurements we can have significant accuracy of measurement in aggregate.

And that's a quick summary of how it works; in practice there are more considerations, but there's also more statistical theory that covers those considerations too. Hopefully I've managed to give you at least some idea of how this works though.

Well, if you want to get into raw numbers, the United States is responsible for at least a few million deaths worldwide since the end of WWII. If you count our proxy wars and the wars we helped arrange, such as the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviet-Afghan conflict, various central American death squads, etc, then it is upwards of 20-30 million dead in the last sixty years or so.

(Here's a weak source, but discussing our empire isn't exactly acceptable conversation in regular media outlets. The basic facts are undeniable, even if you'd like to discount our role in arranging, funding, and supplying arms for war that are in our own interest.)

We're not above watching people die of starvation either:

As many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the Persian Gulf war because of economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council. ...
The sanctions were imposed by the Security Council after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Led by the United States, the Council has rejected many Iraqi appeals to lift the restrictions, which have crippled the economy, until Iraq accounts for all its weapons of mass destruction and United Nations inspectors can certify that they have been destroyed in accordance with several Council resolutions.

I think we all remember how many WMDs were found after we spilled the blood of our own and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, along with emptying our treasury of five trillion dollars.

In any case, what is undeniable is that the United States of today and the Stalinist era of the USSR both share one common feature: the respective governments of both nations are hiding their decisions to have people killed and imprisoned from a transparent judicial process. Our government has now openly declared that the political elite are above the law.

But instead of talking about those hard realities, you have backpedaled to the position that we are not as bad as Stalin.

Well, that's a load off my mind! I hope Obama spends the 4th helping military doctors force feed hunger striking prisoners at Guantanamo while they celebrate spending the rest of their lives without the right to a trial. I even have an idea of what we can write on the cake:

"NOT AS BAD AS STALIN!"
"USA! USA! USA!"

Tell me about the 'secret laws'

You don't fucking get it, do you? How can he tell you about a secret law? The ACLU and other organizations continue to ask the government that very same question, but the government refuses.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of the Nation's Capital, and Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed a motion today with the secret court that oversees government surveillance in national security cases, requesting that it publish its opinions on the meaning, scope, and constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That section, which authorizes the government to obtain "any tangible thing" relevant to foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigations, was the legal basis for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order revealed last week by The Guardian requiring Verizon to turn over months' worth of phone-call data.

"The ultimate check on governmental overreach is the American public," said Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "For years, the government has secretly relied on sweeping interpretations of its surveillance powers, preventing the very debate it has now belatedly invited on the wisdom and legality of those powers."

In addition to the initial rulings by the court on Section 215, the motion filed today also asks whether earlier opinions have been revisited in light of more recent rulings by other courts, such as the Supreme Court's 2012 decision in the GPS tracking case U.S. v. Jones. Another answer sought by the motion is whether the FISA Court has considered the constitutionality of the "gag order" that bars companies from revealing that they have been ordered to turn over information under Section 215. (In 2008, a federal appeals court agreed with the ACLU that an analogous gag order provision relating to "national security letters" was unconstitutional.)

"In a democracy, there should be no room for secret law," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. "The public has a right to know what limits apply to the government's surveillance authority, and what safeguards are in place to protect individual privacy."

Also, don't wonder why the world tells you to go fuck yourself when you ask for Snowden. If you weren't murdering teenagers with completely illegal and immoral drone strike programs after killing a few hundred thousand civilians in multiple wars of aggression, maybe everyone wouldn't burst out in laughter every time you uttered the phrase "rule of law."