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Comment: Re:How can they have only $60M of liabilities? (Score 3, Insightful) 465

by dj245 (#46368969) Attached to: MtGox Files For Bankruptcy Protection

No, client funds are not company funds. If you run a parking lot and a car gets stolen from the lot you're not liable for replacing the car. You might get that liabilty if your valet wrecked the car, but not in general. Same with deposit boxes, storage lockers, mail packages and so on if you want to get your money back in case of theft you need insurance. Which is what FDIC is for bank accounts. No insurance, then you might not even have a claim against MtGox. First you'd have to take them to court and win to make them liable for damages. And even if you do, well there won't be any money to collect there anyway.

In accounting, generally deposit accounts with customer money are considered liabilities. If a depositor shows up and asks for their money, you are obligated to give it to them. You seem to be confusing legal liability (a "duty of care" to do or not do something) with financial liability (an obligation which must be paid back).

Mt. Gox didn't have storage boxes without knowledge of what was inside them (safe deposit box analogy). They had computerized accounts for each customer, with money in each account. Regardless of whether they were a "bank" they were holding money for other people and that money is a liability in the financial sense.

Comment: Re:Vive le Galt! (Score 2) 695

by dj245 (#46337307) Attached to: Mt. Gox Gone? Apparent Theft Shakes Bitcoin World

Except that in many areas you most likely could not find a local CE that was also a certified PE to do the engineering work necessary, theres lots of small areas in the US that have no engineering firms at all. You probably could not legally do the work without a certified PE or else the local government would be at fault when the bridge collapses and kills people

The most highly educated, doctors, engineers, etc, are going to be mainly focused around urban centers. Im not saying its not a nice idea, for small little community actions, party planning, things that dont require actual expertise this will work wonderfully. But for things that require an actual college education en-mass to do the work, it just cant happen in alot of america

Most civil engineers get a PE at some point. It is basically required for them to do their jobs. When I sat for the test it appeared to be 60% civil engineers, 25% land surveyors, and 15% electrical/mechanical engineers. I talked to a few and they said that without the PE, job progression beyond entry level drafting work was impossible.

Comment: Re:Zero point to this movie... (Score 1) 53

by dj245 (#46304313) Attached to: Zero Point: The First 360-Degree Movie Made For the Oculus Rift

The kickstarter was in August 2012 and all they seem to have done since then is spend kickstarter / VC money and repeatedly redesign thier product as newer technologies become available / cheaper. Still no date for actually shipping a product.

It's less than two years since the funding was approved. You sound like VS's with no prior experience of hardware development. The "couple of months" between project start to functional hardware is for when a product already is mature and you are going for a mall improvement.

For a product like this? As far as I know they are still in prototyping. The certification process needed to sell it to consumers in large scale haven't even started. It is waaay to early to give a shipping date. Even if they finalize the design now they won't be done with the paperwork until the end of the year. Don't expect a shipping date until 2015.

The problem for them with this kickstarter/open approach is that everybody knows their progress. A private company can keep this kind of R&D project under wraps until the last minute. Microsoft or Sony could be developing something very similar but we won't know until they choose to release that information. Because Occulus Rift development is open and seems to be carefully plodding along, I would keep that kind of project secret since revealing it might spur Occulus to hurry up and release something. A private company could catch Occulus with their pants down.

Comment: Re:The Safe Bet Here (Score 1) 173

by dj245 (#46247117) Attached to: Federal Smartphone Kill-Switch Legislation Proposed

How would you even measure something like that?

Witness statements. If "Give me your phone!" is the first thing the mugger says, he probably was after the phone. If the conversation instead goes:
Mugger: Give me your wallet
(Victim hands it over)
Mugger: Hey there isn't any cash! Give me your shoes/jacket/watch/whatever else you have

They were probably mugging in general, and the phone was just part of the haul.

+ - Is this the biggest rip-off ever built on open source?-> 2

Submitted by littlekorea
littlekorea writes "Australia's weather bureau has racked up bills of $38 million for a water data system, based on Red Hat Linux, MySQL and Java, that was originally scheduled to cost somewhere between $2 million and $5 million. The Bureau's supplier, an ASX-listed IT services provider SMS Management and Technology, did a good job of embedding itself in the bureau, with all changes having to be made by the original consultant that built it. Smells fishy?"
Link to Original Source

+ - Dice runs scared. 6

Submitted by cfulton
cfulton writes "Slashdot management was found hiding under their desks today after a full scale nuclear meltdown on their site. Unable to post a reasonable reply to the thousands of negative comments on their BETA format, they simply modded down all the relevant comments. Then after running around the office for a while they all hid under their desks hoping it would all just go away."

+ - Is Slashdot staying relevant to Nerds that Matter with stuff that's news? 4

Submitted by mmell
mmell writes "Recently, Slashdot unveiled a new look and not unlike virtually every update the people running /. attempt, this proposed, beta change has caused widespread panic and hysteria such as not been seen since the broadcast of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. At what point do users of a free service gain a right to destroy that service (evidence of which is clearly visible throughout the site and requires no citation)? Has the average /. user devolved to the level of all the non-slashdotters we used to make fun of?"

+ - slashdot drives away people with beta 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "For many months now, people have been quietly redirected to slashdot's beta site (beta.slashdot.org). Any negative feedback of the beta is ignored and/or disavowed. The majority of viewers do not like the beta — resulting in major loss of viewership.

Will slashdot alienate existing users of the site and keep pushing the beta OR will it keep the users and boot the beta?"

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

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