Maybe not, but the fact that wheat is useful as a foodstuff makes it extremely unlikely to be chosen as currency, or to "back currency."

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

This. Times a million

Every currency (Yes, Virginia, even gold-standard currencies) are completely fake and arbitrary. The difference between fake and arbitrary fiat currency and fake and arbitrary gold-standard currency is exactly one layer of abstraction, because the "value" of gold is in itself pretty arbitrary. It is somewhat rare, but it's "value" is completely generated by the human mind. Which is actually for the best--can you imagine how high the price of gold would be if it was actually useful for something besides making jewelry and helping Fox News scam old people out of their savings with terrible gold investment opportunities?

Humans assigned "value" to gold because it was rare-enough to avoid hyper-inflation, but common enough that you didn't have to worry about deflation. And that worked just fine for a few tens of thousands of years... until there were too many humans for the world supply of gold to adequately represent new wealth and value as they're created.

If a more numerous race of aliens had evolved on this planet they might have assigned value to blades of grass, pebbles, or certain kinds of trees in a similar matter based on their own needs.

Which is why the entire "gold standard" argument (that "our money is fake and worthless") is so stupid: Yes, it is fake and worthless. So is all other money, everywhere--the value comes from the perception. So it doesn't matter if its "backed by gold" or "backed by Jell-O Pudding pops" the fact is, the value is based totally on the perception of value of something. With fiat currency, it's the perception of the value of what you can buy, with "gold-standard" currency it's the perception of the value of the gold. But neither has any "real" value without that perception.

While you're working on it, how about a new name? "Supercharger" is already a "thing" in automobile-lingo. And yes, I know most Slashdotters may not be gear-heads, using a name of a thing that already exists is glaring to those of us who are.

Thanx!

I saw a short section of the German version of that Nova show ... apparently I speak fluent German in the that version!

Mit den besten Wünschen,
-Cliff

And my thanks back to you, oh Anonymous Coward: The 15 cents in royalties from your purchase of m'book is now helping my kids attend college. Uh, it'll last about 1.3 minutes.

You say that you're managing firewalls - all sorts of possibilities! I had the honor of working with Van Jacobson at LBL when he first researched TCP/IP traffic jams and compression. I was amazed at how much could be done by looking at traffic and thinking about the interaction of traffic, buffers, routers, and network congestion. Wonderful stuff - what looks like a boring problem may be an opportunity for research.

With that in mind, here's my encouragement to you: Go and sharpen your tcpdump & wireshark tools. Figure out what's really happening to those packets. Who knows what you'll uncover?

(blush). Thanks!

Now it's your turn: Go forth and make our networked community friendlier, stronger, more trustworthy, and more useful.

Best wishes,
-Cliff

PS: Of course, you raise a fascinating, self-referential question. How can you tell if this posting is from the real Cliff Stoll? I know it's me - and it's easy to prove in person, but difficult online. For the best proof, well, stop by for coffee. Way more fun than posting online.

It's been a quarter century since I chased down those hackers. Hard to think back that far: 2400 baud modems were rarities, BSD Unix was uncommon, and almost nobody had a pocket pager. As an astronomy postdoc (not a grad student), I ran a few Unix boxes at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. When the accounting system crashed, my reaction was curiosity: How come this isn't working? It's an attitude you get from physics -- when you don't understand something, it's a chance to do research. And oh, where it led...

Today, of course, everything's changed: Almost nobody has a pocket pager, 2400 baud modems are a rarity, and Berkeley Unix is, uh, uncommon. What started out as a weirdness hiding in our etc/passwd file has become a multi-billion dollar business. So many stories to tell ...

I've since tiptoed away from computer security; I now make Klein bottles and work alongside some amazing programmers at Newfield Wireless in Berkeley. Much fun debugging code and occasionally uncorking stories from when Unix was young.

Warm cheers to m'slashdot friends,
-Cliff

GM's "bailout" was actually a managed bankruptcy with the terms pre-arranged, and bankruptcy in most US states incldues the discharge of liability, not just debts. It is done that way so creditors can't short-circuit the bankruptcy system and just "Wait to sue" until after you're out of bankruptcy protection.

This liability discharge is one of the main features of bankruptcy. It is why the company that polluted the Elk River in West Virginia (leaving the 2/3 of the state without safe drinking water--some of them to this day) declared bankruptcy in short order after the incident--they knew they had no possible defense against the legal onslaught that was coming, and their executives (who were owed sizable bonuses--coal executives really rake it in) wanted to make sure they filed for bankruptcy BEFORE anybody filed suit, because if a suit was pending when they filed bankruptcy that party could go to court to stop bonuses and incentive pay owed to executives from being payed out. Because if the company was facing a bankruptcy judge and had an already-filed suit for billions in damages he would never (EVER) approve bonus payments to executives and would probably listen pretty favorably to a creditor who insisted the executives not be able to loot the place ahead of their judgement.

...Because on-board video cameras can't be vandalized, of course! And it may be the case that you have to identify yourself before the door opens on the car, true, but that doesn't stop a vandal from hopping in one of the other doors and damaging the car after you've identified yourself... Or they could just steal your mobile phone and summon a robot car with the robot car app...

Trust me: If it exists, there's a way to break it without getting caught. My first instinct is to use the technique used on british speed cameras: Kitchen plastic wrap strapped tight across the camera lens. If done correctly, the camera doesn't look "broken" to a casual observer, but this effectively renders images from the camera a useless, blurry, translucent mess.

I think the point is that the language is intentionally vague to conceal the meaning from an uncritical public. If critics of the agreements say they contain language that "could allow" certain bad things to happen, proponents can smear-them as "conspiracy theorists" to discount their point of view, and a pliant, lapdog corporate media will lap it up, eagerly.

...We promoted him to Director and now he sits in his office being distracted by shiny things, allowing the rest of us to accomplish the actual business of operating our department.

Try it sometime! The only way it can backfire is if the person has actual-authority over something important--then the company might go out of business. But other than that I'm drawing a blank on negatives.