I trust Fox are honest with their advertisers and are absolutely clear with them on exactly what percentage of the viewers will actually watch the advertising.

But when you have London suggesting context, it could be the Boston closest to London rather than the largest one.

If you talked about going to the Midlands, buying a computer for an arts project, and then mentioned the Mac, it would be a lot less obvious what you were referring to.

Plus, adding extra context information is rarely a bad idea.

I think fraud's a little ore complicated than that. Unless he gained directly from it to the homeowner's detriment it probably isn't.

Being prosecuted for a crime probably doesn't count as detrimental under the law..

Doesn't it typically make half of what you say right?

They're not patenting mathematics. That's not possible. They're patenting applications for the mathematics.

It depends what you're doing. For coarse gestures, it's great. But this seems to allow mouse like precision.

There are techniques. The hands image could just be an application designed with hands in mind and makes an assumption about shape. For hands passing over each other, there are various computer vision techniques that can make good inferences.

Well? Clearly some people would rather pirate than wait. However amoral and impatient you see it, they're not going to stop. They don't have a problem here. HBO has the problem. If HBO wants people to stop they'll need a better tactic than telling people off for not wanting to wait.

Yes. I put it badly. I'll link to Wikipedia's page on the Flynn effect instead

If you had, well....you start to realize how stupid the general public is, and wonder how they managed to not drown looking up at a rainstorm with their mouths open.

That just means they were previously even more stupid.

IQ test certainly seem to be showing a gradual increase, as do other tests correlated to intelligence. The thing is, the really stupid people stand out.

But that's a legal definition, not an assessment of how useful a service is for money laundering, or how it's actually done in practice by people with an interest in not getting caught.

Clearly bitcoin could be used for money laundering. So can lots of other things. Is there a reason to pick bitcoin over the others? I speculate that there is. The person I responded to argued that the logging of transactions would make it less useful.

I'm not sure how money laundering works, but I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The main point is that there's poor connection between who the buyers and sellers are and who is giving and receiving actual money.

People use real estate for money laundering and that's as traceable. Bitcoins have the advantage that they can be split up easily, merged with legitimate funds, bought and sold through legitimate channels, lent, borrowed, and shorted. This makes it a lot easier to obfuscate where the money came from in the first place.

Yeah, but I think that's more about some of them being libertarians who just dream of a currency without eeeevil government rather than having explicit interest in it as a means of making money.

Travel through Mexico or Canada. Or hire a boat or charter a plane.

Except it seems to lose a certain legitimacy when you decide to do so only at a time when you'll be paying high taxes.