Comment Re:Governments will break it, not ban it. (Score 1) 858
Creating a counterfeit Bitcoin would involve breaking public key encryption. If that happens, normal financial transactions would be at just as much risk.
Creating a counterfeit Bitcoin would involve breaking public key encryption. If that happens, normal financial transactions would be at just as much risk.
The soundness of Bitcoin's crypto doesn't seem to have been analyzed by third parties yet. There's nothing in Cryptologia or sci.crypt. Until there's agreement in the crypto community that it's sound, I'd be suspicious.
Bitcoin doesn't really do anything new from a cryptography perspective. It signs transactions with public keys and assumes that there isn't an easy way to find a specific SHA256 hash short of brute force.
Transactions are not very anonymous. If you spend a coin with a server, the server now knows your public key, and can associate it with any other identity information it has for you ( IP address, Facebook login, shipping address, etc.)
A new public key is usually generated for each transaction, so this doesn't actually tell them anything.
Systems like this detect duplicate spending of the same item, but you can't tell if someone has a duplicate but unspent copy of your coins. So you don't know your money been stolen until you try to spend it.
I don't think you've quite understood how the system works. The situation you describe can't happen without the entire network being subverted.
There's also the technical problem that "new transactions are broadcast to all nodes". That won't scale.
This isn't quite correct either. There is a simplified payment verification method that doesn't require the full block chain. The Bitcoin network just needs enough full clients to make it infeasible to subvert the network.
In the UK, you have to be registered with the Financial Services Authority, or the equivalent in another EU/EEA country to run such a service.
What do you mean by "such a service"?
Those assurances aren't entirely heartening, though, unless Amazon is way ahead of the curve with content-filtering technology.
Amazon has the spammer's credit card details, knows where each email comes from, and can freeze or terminate accounts at the touch of a button (or via an algorithm). This gives it a considerable advantage over those that have to passively filter spam.
And in any case, spam filters are pretty damn good these days. I've had a public email address for going on 15 years, which used to get hundreds of spam emails every day. Now it's very rare for even one to slip past GMail's filter.
automate every possible kind of work humans can do
That would require AI with at least human-equivalent intelligence, which is some way off.
Then we can just sit around and maybe push one button or two every once in a while.
Or live a life currently reserved for the extremely wealthy.
2: functional programming and self modifying code have nothing to do with one another.
This is the equivalent of saying lamda functions have nothing to do with functional programming.
No, it's equivalent to saying that lambda functions have nothing to do with self-modifying code.
I'm not sure where this confusion of yours has arisen. Why would you think an anonymous function is self-modifying code?
None of your scenarios are especially likely. Intergalactic travel is too energy-expensive to be a reasonable solution for any of the scenarios you outline.
That sounds even more expensive and even more worthless than invasion.
I wonder if this will have any impact Ubuntu's recent announcement that they are switching to use Yahoo (which is Microsoft Bing underneath) as the default search engine in their next release.
Yahoo already has a history of rolling over for the Chinese government. If Canonical doesn't mind associating with a company that helps oppressive regimes track down dissidents, I don't think Microsoft's announcement is going to make much difference.
I can't find the part in the SLIME manual where it helps me write and debug programs written in any of the languages supported in Visual Studio. The one I care about is C.
C is a statically compiled language, so you can't really build a system like SLIME for it. SLIME needs to be connected to a running VM that it can push code to dynamically. C wasn't designed with that capability in mind.
Tool chain integration that actually works
What doesn't work?
not having to code in lisp to make macros work
Visual Studio doesn't support any programming language with macros, unless someone has made a Boo plugin whilst I wasn't looking.
Or did you mean keyboard macros? Because you don't need to write any code for that, either. Now, I don't think Emacs is as quite good as Vim for defining keyboard macros, but it's certainly better than Visual Studio.
SLIME does not hold a candle to VS sorry.
I can think of plenty of features that SLIME has, but VS does not. However, I can't think of any feature in VS that is not matched by either Emacs itself, SLIME or some other extension.
Could you explain why you think VS is better?
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker