In the 2010 Boréal conference Ted Chiang had an interesting take on the singularity and the computable brain. There is a transcript (in french) here : http://www.actusf.com/spip/article-9802.html.
To sum it up that is what he says :
"There is this thing called ethnobiology, a sub-dicscipline of anthropology, that studies the way civilizations understand and represent the living things.
Ethnobiology reveals a constant in History : we tend to compare our brain to the most complex technology we know.
At the Renaissance, philosopher assimilated the brain to a very complex and subtle clockwork, Freud compared it to a steam engine, which pressure should be evacuated to avoid explosion. In the 40's, schoolboy and schoolgirls were told that brain was like a telephone exchange. Today, computers are the most advanced technology we know, so we tend to compare our brain to it. But like our predecessors, it's very likely that we are wrong.
Let just think forward, and admit that we are totally biased by the fact that computer are now inherent part of our life. Let's admit that there is a chance that our brain may never be modeled by a computer."
I'm french and I worked with two foreigners (US & Canada) in a parisian startup. One of them didn't bother learning french, and it was ok. He was mostly hanging out with other expats, and seemed to enjoy it.
Nonetheless, it is hard for foreigner to find an apartment to rent, but it's hard for everyone. And since whining about real estate is the national sport it somehow eased their integration and they quickly found colleagues to help them in this task.
France is not the UK, and it's not the US either. If you want to come in Paris make sure you're compatible with locals culture and habits. That means try to talk to some people mentioned in the slideshow, visit coworking space and startup offices. You'll be welcomed.
Main economic institutions [1] already maintains databases of consumer goods and services price across countries, but they don't give easy access to the raw data. Glad to see Expatistan filling this gap.
Yes, there are a number of international institutions collecting this data, and almost every single national statistical office collect price data regularly. Sadly, they tend not to make the raw data available.
>Yes, there are a number of international institutions collecting this data, and almost every single national statistical office collect price data regularly. Sadly, they tend not to make the raw data available.
And so you start up a project to change that....and then don't make the raw data available? I'm confused.
Agreed -- looking at the player data[1], IMO the format type is unrecognizable:
## GK / Goalkeepers
Kawashima|Eiji Kawashima, 20 Mar 1983
Nishikawa|Shusaku Nishikawa, 18 Jun 1986
Gonda|Shūichi Gonda, 3 Mar 1989
## DF / Defenders
Inoha|Masahiko Inoha, 28 Aug 1985
G. Sakai|Gōtoku Sakai, 14 Mar 1991
Nagatomo|Yuto Nagatomo, 12 Sep 1986
Uchida|Atsuto Uchida, 27 Mar 1988
Konno|Yasuyuki Konno, 25 Jan 1983
Kurihara|Yuzo Kurihara, 18 Sep 1983
H. Sakai|Hiroki Sakai, 12 Apr 1990
Yoshida|Maya Yoshida, 24 Aug 1988
Masato Morishige, 21 May 1987 ## Japan F.C. Tokyo
Comments as a double-hash, key fields are either player last name or occasionally first initial-space-last name, then three different delimiters of pipe, then comma, then tab. Choosing either a consistently delimited format or a more verbose JSON/YAML structure with clear metadata would seem to be a better approach.
The size of JSON files is huge compared to delimited data. Languages like Python make it equally easy to consume delimited data and JSON, so it shouldn't matter much.
At work I built a system to consume feeds of numerous automotive dealer inventories and the easiest to work with is always comma delimited. There are some people out there who have no business building an XML document, and unfortunately I've had to build adapters for many of them. It takes me a few hours to get set up to consume a new CSV feed and a few days for XML, not counting mapping their industry / category / manufacturer data to ours.
> Famo.us is built around a neat idea: by directly using the CSS matrix3d transform in combination with the window.requestAnimationFrame function, you can describe the complete layout and animation of your app in a way that’s hardware accelerated with consistent performance.
> It’s a stroke of genius, but in order to implement that simple idea you need a sophisticated math library to help translate your app’s UI into the series of matrix transformations that get pushed to the GPU. This library is Famo.us.
It's a stroke of genius, yes, that others have had before now. Lime.js did this three years ago (mapping animations to hardware-accelerated CSS). Cocos2Dx-Javascript does this one step better by bridging into actually-native rendering code. Three.js has DOM-with-CSS-transformations. IIRC someone implemented hardware-accelerated CoreAnimation in Cappuccino using CSS transformations. So, not really new. I'm curious to see what new ideas they DO bring.
he might have been naive, stupid even, but definitely not to blame: they effectively broke the law.
IANAL and I'm not based in US but I would guess the only way to do this legally would be for MS to go to a law-enforcement agency, the agency would need to get a warrant and then the agency would be able to look into it, not MS itself.
What law would deter them from doing so? They are microsoft's computers. I'm sure the EULA has them covered legally, and I bet they asked their legal team before going in.
there are constitutional guarantees on the secrecy of correspondence and email is considered (by the law) the same as letters therefore legally protected from all forms of eavesdropping.
contracts are not above the law, if a contracts stipulates something illegal it doesn't matter that both parties agreed to it
This seems to disagree with you, seems you are required to litigate to get your rights.
The blogger was french also, so that probably has a bearing on what rights he has.
Him being from Europe makes this worse to me. Why isn't this reason enough to void Microsoft's safe harbor guarantees for the Data Protection Act? I'm sure they're all rubbish, but Microsoft are provably not protecting European rights here and I wish somebody forced these companies to take it seriously.
That's for federal agencies and a third party's server. Considering microsoft are not a third party, not a federal agency and it's their own server, I don't think that law is relevant.
Does Microsoft disclose my personal information outside of Microsoft? You consent and agree that Microsoft may access, disclose, or preserve information associated with your use of the services, including (without limitation) your personal information and content, or information that Microsoft acquires about you through your use of the services (such as IP address or other third-party information) when Microsoft forms a good faith belief that doing so is necessary (a) to comply with applicable law or to respond to legal process from competent authorities; (b) to enforce this agreement or protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers; or (c) to help prevent a loss of life or serious physical injury to anyone.
Notice the bit about "protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers".
A cornerstone of the currency rests on random folks like this threads OP not disclosing transaction IDs? That sounds like an incredibly weak cornerstone to me.
Actually, disclosing the transaction ID would demonstrate the real cornerstone of bitcoin: the fact that when you get your fingernail under the surface, the whole thing peels up. Identifying Satoshi's account would likely reveal a great deal of information about him and his dealings, and the de-anonymizing can occur anytime, even years or centuries after the fact.
I have a question about Bitcoin: If someone spends some bitcoin at a cafe, then spends some at the XXX porn shop down the street, can the cafe look at the block chain and deduce that the person visited the porn shop?
You can see that I sent 0.00597702 BTC to an address beginning "1Jtfi". That was worth $3.99 yesterday, suggesting a USD pricing structure for that transaction.
In the previous transaction, you can see 0.1198 BTC ($79.49) being paid to me. You might deduce that I sold something for bitcoin, or that I bought some bitcoin from someone. Given that they came from six different addresses, you might conclude that this is probably not a direct person-to-person trade, but went through some sort of escrow or mixer. The odd USD value might suggest non-USD, but it could easily have been $80 yesterday.
Prior to that, I paid the same 1Jtfi address 0.0278 BTC. If you track the exchange rate back to the date of that TX, you can see it works out to $3.99 again, showing that I'm paying the same entity the same amount of money on multiple occasions.
Prior to that, 1AVZ paid me 0.00271878 BTC
Prior to that, I paid 0.0326 BTC to 1P4v.
Let's assume that 1Jtfi is the cafe (it's actually me buying reddit gold for people, hence $3.99 each time). They can look up my blockchain info (not just on blockchain.info, that's just a convenient way of browsing it) and see the whole ledger.
If the cafe knows that the 1P4v address is a porn site (let's say the porn site publish a donation address), then it's incontrovertible.
Click the 'change address' 1BTCcq (nice vanity address).
Now try to track the seller, guess which of the two addresses is him and which is his client. It's pretty obvious that 1DPwh is the buyer and 1P5s1 is the same seller again.
Now we can basically track the smaller amounts, with the theory that the guy I bought from is selling small amount from a large stash, keep clicking the larger amount,
Ah, now who's our guy? Well, it's probably the one who kept an odd number of coins (much more likely someone will buy 5 BTC than 4.86764344 BTC).
Now, the proper way to do it is for me to set up a new address for each transaction and move my funds between addresses every time I transact. That way you can't prove whether me sending $80 to 1abcde is sending to myself or to someone else. You can't trace the funds like we just did, because there's no time to establish patterns. You'd also want to avoid sending BTC to an address you've sent to before, and avoid round numbers of BTC. And avoid transacting at timestamps with a pattern to them.
So, it's theoretically capable of a decent level of anonymity. But as with most things, in practice it is susceptible to human error.
By the way, if you liked this comment, feel free to donate bitcoin to 1PWSyqweZ7SZ8AMi9hWRtEU5Cd7PEvb9em - maybe I can have fun tracing your transactions too :)
Replying again to say that I am extremely touched by both donations that I received, and I have sent them on to the address being used to gather funds by the bitcoin community as an apology to Dorian Nakamoto.
You always give a transaction you received before in order to spend coins. However, you're supposed to use a fresh (source) address for every new transaction (the wallet software does it for you).
You can't (with the default wallet software) chose which transaction (called unspent transaction) you use in order to spend you coin (this is called coin control).
That is, you can trace coins, not owners, unless you're always using the same source address.
The payer uses a source address, which changes because each transaction should "kill" the original source, sending it's money to two addresses: the payee and the "change" that goes back to the payer but using a newly invented address.
You can invent a new destination address each time you transact (to get paid or to receive change). You make a new address by picking a random number and doing some math.
I'm a bit new to bitcoins, but is it technically possible for the bitcoins community as a whole to make a blacklist of bitcoins addresses and "ban" the stolen bitcoins ?
Such blacklist would daunt robbers and enforce public trust in bitcoins.
This is not technically speaking impossible, but the Bitcoin community has a visceral hatred for the idea, because it allows off-blockchain-entities to effectively deprive them of the use of their coins. It also undermines trust in the currency generally, since why accept Bitcoins if there is the possibility that you'd be paid with black Bitcoins instead of white Bitcoins, when you're practically speaking guaranteed that all dollars are green.
Also "Take all the coins that went through Silk Road. Now, floodfill forward." (probably) colors most of the network black.
Well, the supply of BTC is finite, so simply excluding stolen BTC's has some additional problems. May be better than not addressing it, but while BTC provides a mechanism for following them through the transaction chain, it's not that simple to ID what addresses contain "stolen" BTC. What if the thieves are able to launder them through unwitting proxies? For example, steal a bunch of BTC, sell them on another exchange immediately, and now, how do you blacklist those "stolen" bitcoins without screwing over an innocent bystander?
Because transactions are recorded in a public blockchain, couldn't that be a big downside for anyone accepting bitcoin whether or not the coins appear on a blacklist/warning list. If a sending wallet address is associated with some contested activity (e.g. someone getting sued, or indited), I could imagine that those BTC could easily get swept up in the legal actions to unwind or resolve the activity.
This vs accepting cash which is fungible, and would need some other evidence associating the buyers money with the contested activity. At least the resolution activity there would likely be stopped at one level from receiving the cash, but with BTC, you happen to be able to track that one specific coin right through multiple layers of transactions. I can see lawyers tracking all the way out to the current holder of a given BTC.
edit: Upon a bit more side reading, I think the tracability of a given BTC is a bit overstated here.
I'm pretty sure your logic is flawed. Someone is already screwed, its sort of why police can confiscate stolen goods even if you paid for them.
I'd like to know if it would be feasible to regulate in someway to claim ownership of said coins and have them returned should they turn up in some sort of regulated clearing house / exchange. Caveat: I know this is in no way possible right now, yet as soon as this block chain gets large enough we are going to have some form of centralization going on, and with that I am certain it will be regulated in some way eventually. That is, if it lasts that long.
What exactly is the plan to deal with a multi terabyte block chain anyways?
Sometimes, yes. Not always - it depends on how the transactions inside the wallet are organised, which is not usually displayed unless you go looking for it.
Not that it matters - if 100BTC go into a wallet, and an hour later 100BTC comes out of that wallet, it's fairly irrelevant whether or not they're the same coins.
Well, it does matter - if 100 stolen BTC go into a wallet that has 900 BTC already, and then 1000 deals of 1BTC go out to different wallets... then you blacklist and seize all 1000 outgoing BTC or some arbitrary 100 BTC or some specific (how) 100 BTC?
It would be possible if enough miners started supporting a blacklist, but the real problem is not enforcing it, but who decides which coins are "stolen"?
Bitcoin is decentralized, and that's the benefit of it. Creating a global block list would go against that.
Others have proposed such measure. And it sounds like a good thing on its face.
The problem is that who then decides which coins are "bad"? Does the US Government get to decide? How about coins that fund organizations that the US Government doesn't care for?
My personal opinion is that no bitcoin should ever be tagged as better or worse than any other one. By messing with the fungibility of the currency, we would do way more harm in the long run than good.
In principle everybody can decide for themselves which bitcoin they are willing to accept (there's no need for a central authority to do this).
If enough participants agree that bitcoin from a certain source are 'tainted', they become less valuable (similar to what we have seen at the Mt Gox exchange).
Bitcoin are very clearly distinguishable and thus there's no reason for them to be long-term fungible.
But what if I steal a Bitcoin and exchange it directly to USD. If the coin is banned later my counterparty, who acted in good faith, is left with an empty bag.
The result is that even if you can prove that someone else holds a dollar bill that was stolen from you at some point, you do not necessarily have the right to get it back.
"legal tender" is a strange concept. For example, £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes are not legal tender in Scotland. But I don't think most Scottish people consider those notes to be "more like a commodity than money."
I'm not sure what happens if stolen Euros or gold are accepted as payment. These aren't legal tender in the US, so if they are exempt from the aforementioned rule, then bitcoins might be as well.
This is no different from real life scenarios. Suppose someone stole a $5000 ring, sold it for $2500. The ring is still stolen, the police can and will confiscate the ring, so the buyer is out of the $5000 ring and their $2500 paid for the stolen property. The ring is stolen from the owner, the money is stolen from the buyer.
Yea--keep the loot; won't bother to retrieve stolen bikes at
flea markets; cruise the streets looking for marginal DUI's;
always handing out tickets for marginal infractions.
I look at them as Tax Collectors. For protection, I would
have more luck printing out a Physibe gun.
I think that would depend on jurisdiction but I don't think reclaiming would be workable in this scenario.
Imagine this: I exploit malleability and deposit directly in my BTC-e account, exchange to LTC etc, etc on dozens of exchange and finally to USD. I cash out to cash and disappear. I of course gave my final stop false information. So now my last victim gets a claim, if this last victim happens to be an exchange and it is forced to pay up and the amount is somewhat significant that exchange is now insolvent. Whose problem is that? The exchange declares bankruptcy and their customers get a haircut.
You're describing money laundering, which scrubs the stolen property of its association with a crime. Its a technique which can obviously be successful, but is a crime in its own right.
The main issue here is that once a Bitcoin enters a wallet, it's indistinguishable from the other BTC in that wallet. So you'd have to blacklist whole wallets, and since you can't deny payments, people possessing stolen BTC would simply tip anyone trying to enforce this scheme.
while in theory possible, this approach has not been done because it is said to be a slippery slope down the lines of being against "bitcoin neutrality".
once the feature exists to treat one set of coins different from another, it leaves the protocol open to control by centralized parties - they could ban the use of "unidentified coins", etc.
To sum it up that is what he says : "There is this thing called ethnobiology, a sub-dicscipline of anthropology, that studies the way civilizations understand and represent the living things. Ethnobiology reveals a constant in History : we tend to compare our brain to the most complex technology we know. At the Renaissance, philosopher assimilated the brain to a very complex and subtle clockwork, Freud compared it to a steam engine, which pressure should be evacuated to avoid explosion. In the 40's, schoolboy and schoolgirls were told that brain was like a telephone exchange. Today, computers are the most advanced technology we know, so we tend to compare our brain to it. But like our predecessors, it's very likely that we are wrong. Let just think forward, and admit that we are totally biased by the fact that computer are now inherent part of our life. Let's admit that there is a chance that our brain may never be modeled by a computer."