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+ - Bitcoin to be regulated under US money laundering laws->

Submitted by
davek
davek writes "Last November, in an act of sheer monetary desperation, the ECB issued an exhaustive, and quite ridiculous, pamphlet titled "Virtual Currency Schemes" in which it mocked and warned about the "ponziness" of such electronic currencies as BitCoin. Why a central bank would stoop so "low" to even acknowledge what no "self-respecting" (sic) PhD-clad economist would even discuss, drunk and slurring, at cocktail parties, remains a mystery to this day. However, that it did so over fears the official artificial currency of the insolvent continent, the EUR, may be becoming even more "ponzi" than the BitCoins the ECB was warning about, was clear to everyone involved who saw right through the cheap propaganda attempt. Feel free to ask any Cypriot if they would now rather have their money in locked up Euros, or in "ponzi" yet freely transferable, unregulated BitCoins."
Link to Original Source

Comment: But we DO have twitter now (Score 1) 456

by davek (#43227549) Attached to: Could Twitter Have Stopped the Media's Rush To War In Iraq Ten Years Ago?

And the media continues to spread disinformation to advance its own pet causes. The United States has continued nation building, and has even started NEW wars (and proxy wars) since twitter came of age. It wasn't twitter that had to go to the floor of the house and demand that the President of the USA declare he doesn't have the right to kill us in our sleep! I agree it's an interesting tool for the spreading of links and content, and with more information it seems that people /should/ be more informed, it's just the reality of today doesn't seem to reflect that at all.

To quote the cliche: The Revolution will not be televised (or tweeted, probably).

+ - New results indicate that particle discovered at CERN is a Higgs boson-> 1

Submitted by M3.14
M3.14 writes "It seems that the statistic is more and more in favor of latest big LHC discovery being the Higgs boson everyone is expecting. There are still some unanswered questions though.
From the article: At the Moriond Conference, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented preliminary new results that further elucidate the particle discovered last year. Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model."

Link to Original Source

Comment: What, no countersuit for legal fees? (Score 1) 227

by davek (#42454845) Attached to: Patent Troll Targeting Users of Scanners; Wants $1000/Employee

FTA:

In the end, Hill and his fellow lawyers at his small Atlanta firm, Hill, Kertscher and Wharton, didn’t have a lot of fight in them. Two weeks after he filed the third-party complaint, Project Paperless dropped its lawsuit. No settlement, no deal—they just went away. (As a result, the scanner makers never actually came to court.)

That can't be where it ends. Where's the countersuit for legal fees? Compensation for the money required to do the prior-art search? There's protection (albeit not enough) from frivolous and vindictive (perhaps even defamatory, in this case) lawsuits.

Comment: Same as the old boss (Score 2) 83

by davek (#42347753) Attached to: Obama Releases National Strategy For Information Sharing

This strategy makes it clear that the individual privacy, civil rights and civil liberties of United States persons must be — and will be — protected.

Why don't I believe you? Oh, that's right, because you've expanded the power of the police state just as much as any executive before you.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Privacy

Grumman Building Football Field-Sized Robotic Surveillance Blimp 150

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the evil-genius-for-a-better-tomorrow dept.
colinneagle writes with news of the latest in 1930s surveillance technology turned into a robot. From the article: "It's not fashionable to call this flying spy (hybrid military airship) a 'blimp,' but a Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV). You are no doubt familiar with the Goodyear blimp that hovers over football games, but the LEMV is almost the size of a seven-story flying football field; it's meant to fly at speeds between 30 and 80 knots without ceasing for 21 straight days while providing an 'unblinking' eye of surveillance. Northrop Grumman has a $517 million contract to build three of these 21st-century robotic airships for the U.S. Army. The first of three had a successful 90-minute test flight last week from the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. This first test flight included two pilots, but the Army intends for the LEMV to be like the Predator, an unmanned flying surveillance machine. Both Northrop Grumman and the Army must like the term 'unblinking,' as it was used several times to describe the 'Revolutionary ISR Weapon System' aka the LEMV."
Yahoo!

Axis, Yahoo's New Browser 194

Posted by samzenpus
from the new-kid-on-the-block dept.
markjhood2003 writes "Fresh on the heels of Slashdot's discussion of the lack of browser choice on mobile devices comes the announcement of Yahoo's new web browser Axis. According to VentureBeat, the browser runs on iPad and iPhone as a separate standalone browser and as an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with support for Android and Windows Phone coming soon. It actually appears to bring some innovation to mobile search, displaying results and queries on the same page for more productive navigation between the two."
Communications

Ask Slashdot: How Can I Get Through To a Politician By E-mail? 204

Posted by timothy
from the breaking-through-the-sea-of-spam dept.
wytcld writes "Sending an individually-written e-mail to my state senator resulted in an automated response saying that since she receives hundreds of e-mails a day, there might be no personal response, but please don't take that to mean she hasn't read my e-mail. So I contacted her again suggesting that was a pretty poor answer. Most of the e-mails she receives are mass mailings coordinated by various interest group websites. Why doesn't she put those to the side, I asked, and prioritize response to individual e-mails from constituents who've taken the time to actually write? Her response? She often can't tell the difference at first, so spends time drafting responses to the first instances of group e-mail spam, and gets diverted from responding to those who really write her. Are there tools out there which a politician can use to identify the incoming group-think blasts and put them to to side? It's easy enough to imagine sorting by repeated content or headers, if I ran the mail server, but I'm looking for packages already out there that a state-level representative, with no staff to speak of, might use to cut through the mess and prioritize communication with constituents who care enough about an issue to draft their own thoughts."

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