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Comment: Re:Forgotten (Score 1) 295

by djmurdoch (#43774513) Attached to: Charge Your Cellphone In 20 Seconds (Eventually)

Who said anything about cables?

You did. You talked about quickly transferring a lot of energy from a charger to your battery.

Swapping batteries is the only fast way to transfer that amount of energy quickly without doing it over wires, and that doesn't need any fancy new supercapacitors. I already do that with my camera: charge a battery over a few hours, then swap it with the existing one when I need more power.

Comment: Re:It doesn't matter and doesn't help. (Score 1) 989

Beer is typically about 5% alcohol, wine is around 10-12%. Of course beer affects you less than the same amount of wine.

I think the calculation for wine that you quote is just wrong. According to this calculator http://www.globalrph.com/bac.cgi, I'd need 4 hours to drink a bottle of wine and stay at 0.08, but I'm smaller than you. It says someone with your bodyweight would be at around 0.08 from a bottle of wine over 2 hours.

Comment: Re:This... is a very good idea. (Score 5, Insightful) 110

by djmurdoch (#43668669) Attached to: Honeywords — Honeypot Passwords

It's exactly intended to detect theft of your password database. If you salt in a known way, then it's inconvenient for the attacker, but it's still possible to brute force it. And if there's a bug in whatever hashing scheme you used, it might be easy.

Wouldn't you like to know when someone has done that?

Comment: Re:Emergency Situations? (Score 1) 155

by djmurdoch (#43634287) Attached to: In Sandy-Struck NJ Town, Verizon Goes All Wireless, No Copper

My comment was about the proposal to move everyone to wireless. As others have pointed out, regular wire lines generally work during power failures, because they are powered by the central station, which has battery backup or backup generators.

It's possible that the new wireless modems will have battery backup, which will mean they'll last through short blackouts. I would be astounded if they could be powered by standard batteries that a homeowner would have on hand once their short-term charge is gone.

Comment: Re:Our idiot overlords (Score 1) 314

Nice selective quoting. Your line

Someone who saw the precipitous drop and hit the panic button on their mutual fund (say, a retiree or soon-to-be retiree) would have lost, but good.

pretty much mimics my unquoted line

Only the people who sold in response to the tweet or the drop caused by it, lost money. Doing nothing didn't hurt anybody.

Sure, responding to a drop like that by selling is a really bad idea. That only affected people who are reacting on a hair-trigger. Anyone who took 15 minutes to think about what to do wouldn't have lost anything, because by the time they tried to sell, the price would have been back up. (At that point they might have sold anyways, and lost the commission, but more likely they would have seen that a sale was unnecessary.)

Like you, I have no sympathy for the gamblers and the high-frequency traders who might have been hurt by this, but it would not have hurt anyone who was sensibly invested.

Comment: Re:Our idiot overlords (Score 1) 314

Because a huge number of investors are people with retirement accounts, index funds, etc. They're not sitting at a computer watching the market because they're too busy working for a living. They have 401ks with market exposure because money gets 0% in the bank.

If they didn't respond to the drop, they weren't affected. The market dropped and rose again within a few minutes.

Only the people who sold in response to the tweet or the drop caused by it, lost money. Doing nothing didn't hurt anybody.

(I guess some people might have stop loss orders that would have been triggered, but I'd say today illustrates why those are stupid.)

Comment: Re:Our idiot overlords (Score 2) 314

How did that do any damage to anyone other than idiots? If you had been smart, you'd have a buy order in place ready to buy if the market dipped enough. Then you would have made 1% today without even paying attention.

Seems to me like this was an entirely deserved shot in the foot to anyone who suffered from it.

Comment: Re:luckly we got the blogger to tell us the truth (Score 1) 276

by djmurdoch (#43509751) Attached to: Terrible Advice From a Great Scientist

Why would you believe what E.O. Wilson says? Sociobiology is crap like this: "People do X. That's because evolution makes people who do X more likely to reproduce."

Essentially it gives the same explanation for every observation, without ever making any testable predictions. People like it, because it means that they don't need to take responsibility for how they act: after all, the great scientist says that evolution has selected for people who do that.

Comment: Re:as i've said many times (Score 1) 605

by djmurdoch (#43430681) Attached to: BitCoin Value Collapses, Possibly Due To DDoS

I pointed out how to break this in my other post: police may access your private key in an unrelated investigation, and now they'll have proof that you were involved. Depending on the criminal activity you participated in, they may leave the investigation open for years.

But there's another possibility. There are no proofs that the encryption methods being used are unbreakable, they are just thought to be unbreakable because nobody knows how to break them. Since you can't change signing algorithms (remember the record of the the transaction will last forever), if someone does figure out a way to break them, it means that the police will be able to tie your illegal transaction to all your other transactions, and then it's not too hard to figure out who you are.

I'm not saying this is likely to happen soon, but do you really believe that SHA-256, etc. are going to remain secure forever?

Pushing 30 is exercise enough.

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