JonSkeptic

in a few months time it might be too much of a risk to have an XP machine with internet access.

It's been too much of a risk for several years now. If security is truly a deep concern of your, you wouldn't still be running XP.

In order to avoid confusion, I feel it necessary to point out that it is "Joe Gratz, a San Francisco-based patent lawyer who is representing Twitter in a patent dispute" who said the above quote and not the President of the United States.

While I'm sure that every member of HackerNews would read the article first, clarification may help our visitors who decide to skim the comments =)

My favorite part of the article:

From what I can tell, one of the settings used to deal with division by 0 is the so-called Riemann sphere, which is where we take a space shuttle and use it to fly over and drop a cow on top of a biodome, and then have the cow indiscriminately fire laser beams at the grass inside and around the biodome. That's my intuitive understanding of it anyway.

also:

Our cow isn't staring into infinity. It's looking down at infinity, observing infinity with detached understanding. If our cow were not so enlightened, and also had the facial muscles, it might betray the subtlest of smiles at infinity's infinity face, for infinity's turbid fractal whirlpools and vast lethargic swamps are but swathes of data like any other to this cow.

That's remarkably cheap.

Mt. Gox login is back

In other news: I have a bear trap that is back and ready for anyone to stick their hand in.

The Zimbabwean dollar analogy is appropriate. Throughout its wild swings and hyperinflation, it was backed by a government. Bitcoin is backed by nothing at all.

One is a currency, the other is a commodity.

Even if Gox didn't lose the money, or at least not as much as we're hearing, who's going to 'bank' with them now? Who would leave their money with someone who will, at any time, cut off access and actively refuse to provide information?

Their value has been totally demolished in the eyes of their current customers and in the eyes of all potential customers. It's so bad that it has set back Bitcoin's adoption by months, if not years. The freaking Wall Street Journal published articles about it!

If this is not a case of fraud, then it is one of the worst and most poorly managed acquisitions in history.

This article was an interesting read. It highlights a lot of the positives of American culture. Sometimes it's good to hear such things. Thank you, I needed that.

Sony also just recently had it featured as a free download for Playstation Plus members.

/Sidenote On the PS3, it wasn't worth the bandwidth it took to download. The shoddy textures they used for the console version made it look half a step removed from a late gen PS 2 game. The gameplay and the recycled story didn't help either. It felt like they just took extra character models and levels from the previous BioShock games development, reskinned them and sold it to us it back to us with a plot that consisted of cross out the names of characters and places and writing in new ones.

I hope they do better in the future, but playing that game has dispositioned me to thinking it may not be a bad time to shut down and start over: they need some new ideas.

[insert pun exerting parallel between science and teenager on a date]

Hay-o!

It saddens me that I feel like every interaction with Comcast is a "process" at best and an outer circle of hell on average.

I thought this was a fairly good explanation of Bitcoins broken down into simple terms so that non-technical people can easily grasp the concepts. The Hawala parallel only helps.

That said, it's not really news and doesn't bring any new information to the Bitcoin discussion on Hacker News.

But Dogecoin is doing well.

LaTeX was built to typeset documents. You have pages in documents and pagination is of critical importance in LaTeX. In the web you don't have pages, it's evolved to be seamless and scrollable. Natuarally, LaTeX was not designed for such an environment.

That doesn't mean that LaTeX is worthless on the web. The gluing algorithms that Knuth used for creating sentences and paragraphs do (for the most part) work, even in documents without pages. In all honesty, the web could benefit greatly from LaTeX, pagination aside.

I'm glad that the author seems to have a practical perspective on this: >We think LaTeX is still the best programming language to tell a computer how to place text on a page. But the TeX project started pre-web, in 1978, and its scope and function are tightly linked to the printed page, not the webpage.

He goes on to give an example of constructing a table in LaTex which requires (or assumes by default) a suggested location for LaTeX to place the table in the page; something which is currently nonsensical in all but a few web environments. Like the author, I also find CSS appealing for a potential "LaTeX" on the web solution.

However, LaTeX was designed from the very first to be the next standard in type setting and is a turing complete language. CSS is still under debate for being turing complete, and it lacks nearly all of the features that are iconic of LaTeX, except for the ability to format math equations ( and even then...).

I'm not sure what the next standard in typesetting will be, but it will be designed to be device agnostic (with book existing as a supported format), it will target the web and similar digital media, it will be turing complete, and it will be created specifically to fulfill each of those goals, not to have them retroactively attached in a ham-fisted way.

So they all own one now...?

I'm just not sure about the Oculus. People don't generally like having things strapped to their head (and especially their face) unless absolutely necessary i.e. glasses, goggles, helmets.

Oculus may be really cool to use, but I'm not convinced it will ever work its way out of a very small market segment that is willing to strap a viewing device onto their faces.

Hrm.....I have to say that the technology is really cool, but the video makes it look like nothing more than a gimmick. Notice "makes it look".

They picked a tower defense game to demo this? Really? Who's gonna want to have full upper body motion (lean in, out, sideways, up, down) to play a tower defense game? A few people, for the novelty of it.

This type of marketing is very unfortunate. It's a technology with a lot of really cool potential and this video made it look like a gimmick.

I know that I use python because of how easy it is to code. I can focus wholly, totally on the logic of my code without ever worrying about if I misplaced a semi-colon or left out some weird punctuation.

Python frees me to code and not worry about things that get in the way of coding. That's why it's eating other language's lunches, the freedom is almost intoxicating.

That paper is about 10 years old, or at least the research is. The most current source cited is from 2003. I like to think we've made significant progress in a decade, but in reality inflation would probably be enough by itself to throw those numbers completely out the window.

This reminds me of the Hagakure:

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one's aim is to die a dog's death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one's aim. We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like. But not having attained our aim and continuing to live is cowardice. This is a thin dangerous line. To die without gaining one's aim is a dog's death and fanaticism. But there is no shame in this. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

It is also the case that, being 'normal' takes a degree of energy and conscious thought that is instinctive for most, but to me is a significant expenditure of energy. I think it analogous to speaking a second language.

Sounds about right. I thought it was pretty 'normal' to feel this way sometimes...

The notion that nation-states are allowed to run rampage and be as anarchic as they please, internationally, is stupid.

A world government sounds nice in theory (let's call it 'The Federation'), but I don't think you could even joke about one without peeving off more than half of the global populace. We simply aren't at a place in human history where international law can actually be binding or where nations can put aside their differences and work together (also known as a Power-of-Friendship-ocracy).

So, yeah, a total lack of enforceable international law/government is a stupid idea; I'm just not sure anyone has a better idea yet.

Given the repetition of the phrase "you should continue to monitor your accounts"... I think it would be wise to get a new card if you can.

I agree, but I also think the poster to whom you are responding has a valid point as well. The internet gives us access to a lot of useful information. It also gives us access to orders of magnitude more useless information. And the President of the United States? Well, I just hope that 30 years ago his information was better than what I can find by Googling. (Though hind-sight makes most things clear)

I think the President comparison is useful, because we, if nothing else, have the ability to access so much information that would have made the President's jaw drop three decades ago. However, I agree with the minor nitpick that he had access to higher quality, classified information that the rest of us will never see.

Also, I find this comic to be 100% relevant: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=759#comic

It probably won't be successful, but I'm excited. I can't stop dreaming of a future devoid of javascript.

If you click on the timeline link provided, it pulls up links to the original publications that broke the story. If you were interested in facts, you could read them yourself.

Also, if he is not a spy and is not being charged as one, then he should return to the US. The fact that he can't and won't speaks volumes about his character and his intentions.

Correct me if I'm wrong

You are and it would take a lot to correct that statement. I'd start at the timeline: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/multimedia/timeline-ed...

Most of what Snowden revealed did not relate to domestic spying overreach. Hell, he wasn't even in China for a week before he revealed NSA programs that spy on the Chinese. Snowden has done more damage to his cause than the government ever could, and it's not for lack of trying.

His credibility as a whistleblower has been fatally harmed by choosing to leave the country: not only did he leave, but he went to China and then to Russia, taking an encrypted hardrive with him! You'd have to be really stupid to think the Chinese and Russians have not copied every single piece of information he had, even the information that The Guardian has decided not publish yet because of the damage it could cause.

At this point, he is a spy from every angle you look at it. Between revealing foreign collection activities, giving China and Russia loads of classified information, and fleeing from the U.S. to China and then Russia, there's no case to be made for him being a whistleblower.

He blew the whistle on a few domestic programs and that's a very good thing. But that is such a small part of everything that Snowden did. Still, in total disregard of the facts, some will consider him a whistleblower and a hero.

He is every bit as much of a hero as Edward Lee Howard and I have little doubt he will meet the same fate.

"The experimental weapon, dubbed the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD)"

I gotta give it to them for their ability to name projects.

The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players.

In other news, the NSA to start a new reality TV show: Living Room Security! Find out who's added to a no-fly list this week as we take you live inside your own living room. Brought to you by the Xbox Kinect.

I've seen sci-fi depictions of over-industrialized mega-city scapes, but I never thought I'd actually get to see a picture of one. To call that surreal is an understatement.