As I said, the population goes stupid. Can also be well observed in your statement.

Haven't you heard? The slippery slope is a fallacy, and anyone who makes the argument can be dismissed out of hand. Basically, we're fucked.

I am vehemently opposed to the PATRIOT act, but I personally cannot understand the notion that people, when acting together, lose their constitutional rights, and that's exactly what an opposite ruling in Citizens United would have implied.

.

... there is NOTHING FREE !!!

I am speaking on experience.

I am an American, a naturalized American citizen.

I came from China.

I, and many others, risking our lives and swam to Hong Kong back in the 1970's. They were shooting at us, back then.

We risked our lives not because we were poor (and we were) but because there was NO FREEDOM for the people.

Everything that we did - who your friends were, where you been to, what you did, why you did what you did, everything - was under the watchful eyes of the BIG BROTHER.

I went to the United States precisely because, back then, the United States of America was the only country that could guarantee my freedom, because, back then, the government of the United States of America still had respect for The Constitution.

I became an American citizen precisely because I found the freedom that I had longed for.

That was back then.

Not now.

Nowadays, the so-called "freedom" has all but evaporated.

When the prosecutors (or rather, persecutors ) can charge people with warrantless wiretaps , what is the difference between the United States of America and the former East Germany under Stasi or China under CCP ?

Back when I became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America, my new government was still operating under the Constitution of the United States.

No more.

Under the Obama administration, I am sorry to say, the Constitution of the United States has become as valuable as soiled disposable diaper.

As an American, I am sad.

As one who was from an oppressed state, risking live in order to gain freedom, I am HORRIFIED.

I am watching THE COUNTRY THAT I ADOPTED turning into just like the one I ran away from.

The sad thing is, this is something the Ouya was supposed to provide. You were supposed to be able to use your wired 360 controller, wireless 360 controller with the PC adapter dongle or a compatible dongle, a PS3 controller, the Ouya controller, or any mix thereof. And it sort of worked; for some reason, though, it didn't really. The idea was that the Ouya controller API would abstract away all the differences.

What worked is that all the controllers would actually connect and be recognized as controllers. But as I've mentioned elsewhere, any bluetooth input device was also recognized as a controller, even if it reported itself as a HID keyboard. That meant that my PS3 BD Remote (which I got mapped on one version of the Ouya software) and my Keyboard would be controllers, so I could only have a maximum of two controllers mapped at the same time. And when the keyboard and controller both went to sleep, if I bumped a key on the keyboard before I touched a button on the controller then the keyboard would become controller #1, and no game which depended on an actual controller being controller #1 (most of them) would function. So actually, the ability to do precisely what you say was one of their primary selling points, and they failed completely to deliver on it.

Today, the answer is no. It would be dumb. Do some statistical analysis, figure out what you're most likely to need, stock as much as possible and have a line on more in case of an emergency.

Tomorrow, for some value of tomorrow, the answer will be yes. Because 3D printers will be a proven technology and every hospital will have several on hand to make custom-sized artificial limbs and all the kinds of crap discussed in this article.

In between, the answer will be mostly no.

Whatever drugs you're on, or medication you're skipping, you should lay off. History shows us that the US government is completely capable of long-term planning, as long as we don't make wild and stupid assumptions about their goals.

To put some numbers to this, the EPA says that the average car emits 423 grams of CO2 per mile, and that the average US coal plant emits 1216 lb (551 kg) of CO2 per megawatt-hour produced, which is 551 g per kwh. My Nissan LEAF gets about four miles per kwh. Assuming pure coal power, and ignoring line losses, that means my car causes 138 grams of CO2 to be emitted per mile I drive.

Now, the LEAF is a very small, very efficient car, significantly more efficient than most gasoline-powered cars (mainly for range reasons). So comparing 138 to 423 straight up isn't a fair comparison, but even if you assume a normal car is half as efficient as the LEAF, it's still 276 grams per mile vs 423 grams per mile. Throw in some line losses and the gap closes further... but it's pretty clear that electric vehicles cause less CO2 production than gasoline vehicles, on a per-mile basis, even if all of the electricity comes from coal.

For me it's even better because although Colorado is primarily coal-powered, I mostly charge my car only at the office, and my employer (Google) pays a little extra to buy "green" power, mostly wind and hydro, I think. So my car's carbon footprint is much lower. This highlights another aspect of electric vehicles: if we switch to EVs (where appropriate -- they don't work for everything), it is at least possible to replace coal generation with something cleaner. Wind, hydro, wave, solar, nuclear, geothermal... there are lots of clean ways to generate electricity.

I should also note that I, personally, don't care that much. I bought a LEAF not because I was anxious to save the planet, but because it's cheaper to own and operate than a gasoline-powered car, at least for my driving patterns. The fact that it's cleaner is a pleasant bonus. It's also a lot of fun to drive because electric motors have awesome torque and I love how quiet it is. It's a great little car, and I'm very happy with my decision to buy it (lease it, actually... I think EV tech is changing fast enough right now that there's value in being able to upgrade regularly).

no, it really isn't. It's not universally supported.

no, it really isn't. It doesn't work on any Android after 4.1.1. It also dominates bluetooth, you can't use any other bluetooth peripheral at the same time. This is unacceptable.

And then it doesn't work. I've had it work on GB and on one 4.1.1 build, and it fails everywhere else. I've used both the usual PS3 joystick app as well as USB/BT Joystick Center.

It's broken. So, it's broken.

Beating the network indefinitely would cost about 60 times as much, assuming you can get a reliable 5% APY. (If a 120-day attack costs $X, then the yield from a 60*$X investment at 5% is sufficient to maintain the attack indefinitely.) A factor of 60 is a fairly large difference.

That's assuming you only have 51%. The time required increases asymptotically as you approach 50%. At 60% the attack would take only 12 days, reducing your overall cost by an order of magnitude.

A power supply I'll grant you. I forgot that the Pi boards don't come with one, so that puts us a few dollars over budget. Technical expertise and tools were not included for the $3000 computer in 1985, so it would be unfair to complain that the Pi doesn't include them now. You can get better software for free these days which didn't exist at any price then. And then there's computers like the MK908, which is a bit pricier at $55 but includes a case, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a power supply, and pre-installed software for an essentially plug-and-play experience—just add a cheap USB keyboard and hook it up to your TV.

Businesses will have plenty of incentive to switch to semi-autonomous vehicles for their fleets, provided they're actually safer. That translates into reduced exposure to liability for accidents, less money spent repairing and/or replacing vehicles (and employees), and less lost cargo. If nothing else, their insurance providers will insist on it.

You wouldn't need 51% "indefinitely", just long enough to catch up and make your chain the longest blockchain. After that the rest of the network has a choice: follow the protocol and use your blockchain, or perform a deliberate 51% attack of their own.

Checkpoints and other "community-based mechanisms" are outside of the Bitcoin protocol. In any case checkpoints are inserted into the official client on fairly rare occasions to cover blocks which are already well-established. There won't be any checkpoint protecting the FBI's transaction for some time.

You can't spend someone else's coins without their private key, but you can rewrite history by coming up with a longer blockchain which does not include certain previously-accepted transactions. That would allow DPR, or someone else with his private key, to transfer the funds "before" the FBI moves them to a different account.

At this point it would be really expensive to pull off, since the FBI's transfers are buried 346 blocks behind the head of the blockchain, but you could do it if you controlled 51% or more of the mining network for a long enough time. Assuming you had exactly 51% of the network, and started right now, it should take right at 120 days to overcome the current blockchain's lead. That gets significantly better as you control more of the network; in the best case, if 100% of the network went along with the scheme, it would only take two days.

The recommendation is to use a different account for each order, not just for anonymity but so that you can distinguish the payments apart from the amount, which may not be unique, or even an exact match for the order in the event of a mistake. It's fairly rare even for "legitimate" businesses to have just one account number.

Even apart from unique receiving addresses, any business dealing in large quantities of bitcoins will probably want separate "working funds" and offline "cold storage" accounts, and general practice is to generate a new address every time you send funds to receive the "change". Some consider this more secure against cryptoanalysis since the full public key isn't revealed until the funds are spent, meaning that if you do use a new address every time then the only addresses with known public keys contain no funds.