A friend of mine (who's 15) and myself (I'm 28 with a CS degree) have a nearly working programmable 8-bit computer in Minecraft. ALU is done, all 256 bytes of memory are done, the instruction tape (made out of sand and glass, much like a punchcard) is done, etc. Another 20 someodd hours and we'll have all of the components connected together and the whole CPU completely done. It actually isn't as hard or take as much time as it may sound.

The most impressive thing about this video is that he did all of the math in BCD rather than just running it on a CPU. I already have multiplication (Booth's algorithm) and other operations programmed on our instruction set (we wrote an assembler and emulator outside of Minecraft to work out the kinks). I'd rather do the complex operations in software rather than laying gates and logic in the hardware.

I don't see how he has enough room for displays of that size. You'd need NxM worth of latches to sustain the pistons that drive the pixels as well as the appropriate muxers to select which pixels are turned on. Our 256 byte memory array is bigger than his entire calculator so I'm a bit skeptical that he isn't using some addons.

Finally I get to run a newer kernel on EC2! I have been looking forward to this for months.

Yes but they can also just shut down the transactions. Why DoS something when you can just turn it off? That's what the paper advocates.

( ) You read the paper
(X) You did not read the paper

The paper specifically covers merchant relationships with acquiring banks and credit processing. Purchases were done to track the credit processing. It isn't possible to anonymously spoof that. Also, stopping the transactions is more legislative than market-based.

Yes it is the business model of these banks. However, they are processing through a credit network (Visa / Mastercard) and consumers credit cards are backed by an issuing bank (think Chase, Citibank, etc). Either the credit network or the issuing bank can prevent the transaction without the cooperation of the shady acquiring bank. In fact, there is a "Merchant Category Code" (food, entertainment, drug stores and pharmacies, etc) that the credit network requires be on each transaction and requires to be correct. The credit network or issuing banks don't have to stop all credit transactions to the offending acquiring banks, they can just stop drug stores and pharmacies transactions. You should read the paper.

Am I the only person who actually WANTS these companies to go out of business? I don't want my mother to be able to get the news via paper because it allows her to continue to ignore technology. If I could snap my fingers, new papers, record labels, the POTs phone companies, etc would go out of business. Bring on the technological Darwinism (and give it a push in the right direction if you can).

This is Slashdot, speak in terms we will understand: Lua is used in WoW. http://www.wowwiki.com/Lua.

My fault. I searched the article for "phase" and decided it didn't have the information. Instead of phase, the article said:

...This, in effect, synchronizes power flows.

Sad that the media thinks the average American doesn't know what the term phase means. Even sadder is that they are probably right.

The three power grids are out of phase with each other. Are they doing a AC->DC->AC conversion? It was my understanding that the biggest technical hurdle to connecting the grids was the difficult problem of shifting the phase of one grid to another.

Yeah, even GNU NetCat isn't really a standard replacement. Ncat isn't likely to become one either. It's another tool, it has great features, if it's useful for you use it. I'd say Ncat's primary competitor is probably socat or cryptcat rather than vanilla nc.