Nobody knows that YOU have the Bitcoins. What they know is that "coin" Y is at Bitcoin address 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh. There is only one way to connect Bitcoin address 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh with Person B: By Person A opening his/her big fat mouth.

Otherwise, the only thing you know about the owner of 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh is approximately what planet they live on.

It's already widespread enough to use for some forms of money laundering. If you want to secretly move money from the US to Europe, just buy BTC in the US, deposit them on Mt. Gox (whose domain is registered in Japan, so I assume the servers are also in Japan), and from there sell the BTC and deposit the resulting money in your Swiss bank account.

It's also widespread enough to use instead of a Swiss bank account to hide money. Just move the money into a Bitcoin wallet, encrypt the wallet, and store copies of it on as many computers, in as many countries as possible.

The Bitcoin protocol fixes the rate of inflation by adjusting the size of the hash that needs to be calculated. Big Bitcoin rigs don't cause inflation, they merely increase the odds that newly minted Bitcoins will accrue to them.

I'm never, ever getting an iPhone.

Apropos: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694

I'm sure Apple will miss you terribly. An app was denied. Big deal. No great loss.

If you really want to run the app, jailbreak your phone and run it.

While I don't think it's a major reason not buy an iPhone, it is actually a fairly big problem. I know of at least 3 high profile apps that have been rejected due to "objectionable content" which was nothing more than a few swear words on content loaded from the web.

My problem, aside from the censorship in the first place, is that they don't follow the same standards in their own apps. Search the YouTube app for any swear word and it will happily give you all the swearing you can handle.

Yes, but there's the argument that the browser doesn't directly help you discover content, whereas YouTube app does.

Apple wants to make it illegal for you to jailbreak "your" iPhone.

There has been quite a few reports on this (even a patent?). But can this be legal? Wouldnt this be similar to car manufacturers outlawing fixing your own cd/mp3/casette players in your cars?

You think the Pre is going to be all right? I'm waiting on it, but I've never seen it. What do you suggest as an alternative, I'm about to get a new device.

The g1 running android is pretty great. I've been using it for four months and have very few complaints, plus it's a completely open-source system. The new software update provides an onscreen keyboard if you don't like to type on real keys, but I think having the choice to use a tactile keyboard is really nice. I'll also never own an iphone.

It claims to be a completely open-source system. Wasn't there a case where a tethering app was pulled out by Google from Market due to telco pressure?

Of course being Android, with a few more steps, you can add an alternative "market place". But that's besides the point, it is not completely open even though it claims to be.

At the moment, no, experience-wise for the consumer, it is almost always worse than the iPhone.

And yes, I have both phones.

> Wasn't there a case where a tethering app was pulled out by Google from Market due to telco pressure?

I own neither an iPhone or a G1, so can someone clarify this for me: On the iPhone, you can't get an app on there, except through the App store or jail-breaking? On Andriod, you can do both? So even if your app isn't in the market, you can distribute it separately, which you can't for the iPhone?

That's right. And jail-breaking is not officially supported (that's an understatement) but it works pretty well. So it's a minus for the iPhone.

But then, that's why I said for most consumers, the iPhone is much better. Because for them, the official distribution mechanism is what matters.

The reason why I mentioned the tethering app is that it is not totally open as advertised, although there's more than 1 valid way to work around it.

(You can still distribute apps to the iPhone via ad-hoc or enterprise distribution, but those don't matter here since we are talking about the mass market).

Yes, the Android Market is not open. But the Android OS nonetheless is. If you buy the Android Dev Phone 1, you can modify and compile the source as you wish and flash it onto that phone. No "hacking" necessary.

If you buy a locked-in version from t-mobile you kinda have to "hack" it to flash what you want.

But either way you can install apps without the Android Market.

You can get that tethering app here: http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/

Just thought I clarify:

I'm not saying the Android Market is not an open market. In fact I think it is. It is just not completely open as advertised, if there is such a phrase. And it is definitely more open than Apple App store.

What I am saying is that the App Store along with the iPhone as of now is much better for the majority of consumers. And by that definition, they exclude people who can modify and compile from source :) There are easier ways of course, to distribute/install apps for Android other than through Android Market. You can install from flash drive or even through the browser. But remember, majority of consumers.

I have this thought after developing for the iPhone and investigating Android (I have the Dev Phone and I decided not to) - if you look at the current mobile landscape, it is a new battle ground for Apple. It is like the OS wars again. Instead of Windows/OS X/Linux, we have WM/iPhone OS/Android/Palm Pre. The other platforms may have existing market share (Symbian and BlackBerry), but personally I think these are the ones that will dominate. But instead of how things worked out the last 2 decades which almost killed Apple (and I think on the desktop Macs will continue to be a minority), the iPhone platform has a fresh chance to fight again, and this time, being proprietary, in the sense of the OS not being licensed for other hardware, allows it to have a very distinct advantage over other platforms like WM and Android.

Having said that, while I believe the iPhone platform is the leader now, hopefully it will work out to be more or less evenly spread out, with WM/iPhone/Android/Palm all having significant market share, providing choices, competition and encouraging innovation.

For what it's worth, if NIN submitted the same thing to the Android Market and someone complained, Google could pull it just like Apple did. While I don't think there's anyone actively reviewing the Android apps, there is a wonderfully vague clause in the Android market agreement that says you can't display (or link to!) content unsuitable for people under 18. (Anyone under 18? Everyone under 18? Is Alien Bloodbath really suitable for 3-year-olds? etc.)

http://www.android.com/market/terms/developer-content-policy...

But at least with Android you can still serve the app on your own server.

It was pulled by T-Mobile, not Google. You can still get the app if you aren't on T-Mobile.

And of course, you can install any .apk you like.

How did T-Mobile do it without Google doing it for them?

Ease of programming isn't the issue, at least not when it comes to writing libraries that must interface with C code (as a robot-interfacing library is likely to). Most Schemes and Lisps can interface to C by means of a few simple declarations, while Python requires the C code to accept and return Python's internal data structures (and convert them to a form that can be used by C code), and requires it to register those functions that are to be made visible to Python.

Scheme (PLT)

  (require scheme/foreign)
  (unsafe!)
  (define my-c-lib (ffi-lib "libmylib")) ;; loads libmylib.so
  (define my-c-func (get-ffi-obj 'my_c_func my-c-lib (_fun _long -> _long)))
  ;; The C code does not need to take Scheme into account--
  ;; Existing C libraries can be interfaced with Scheme
  ;; with a trivial amount of effort.

C (to be linked against Python code-- Python can load the resulting shared library as if it was written in Python). Notice that all this code does is interface Linux's htonl function to Python:

  #include <Python.h>
  #include <netinet/in.h>
    
  static PyObject *
  py_htonl(PyObject *self, PyObject *args) {
     long my_arg;
 
     if(!PyArgParseTuple(args, "l", &my_arg))
         return NULL;
     return PyBuildValue("l", htonl(my_arg));
  }
  
  static PyMethodDef methods[] = {
      {"htonl", py_htonl, METH_VARARGS,
       "Demonstrate Python's C interface\n"}
  };
  
  static char module_doc[] = "Demonstration";  
  
  PyMODINIT_FUNC
  initfunc(void) {
    PyInitModule3("mylib", methods, module_doc);
  }

Asking a philosophical question like "what does X really mean" is akin to asking "what data structure would best represent X in a program?" They could even be considered to be the same question. So philosophy is as central to programming as mathematics.

Maybe, instead, programming is as central to philosophy as mathematics is.

This is the second post I've seen from wozad.com where clicking on the headline simply leads to their top-level site (where they try to sell you their service). Smells like spam to me.

agreed. at least lead us to a page where you talk about the css hack and why it is better than cookies, etc.

Smells like spam. Tastes like spam. It is spam!

Your logic is self-serving, don't you think? You have no history of contributing to HN discussion besides posting your company link twice. A post title has little to do with the quality of content on the other side. I think people ignored it for a reason. Not to mention, how is this that much different from Schill's random hack back in 2006?

http://www.schillmania.com/random/humour/web20awareness/

Yes you are right,i should not have linked the post to the main page, this might look a bit rude.Anyway i do think that this application has some kind of value to share. And as i already commented the feedback of this community is very important for us. Finally our methodology is much more extended from the "random hack" you talk about, that random hack is something coded in one evening just to give a proof-of-concept.

Your posts are clearly spam.

Rule of law is a myth. A leaky abstraction. Laws can't rule people because laws don't have minds. People, on the other hand, do have minds, and they use them to create deceptive abstractions like Rule of Law.

If you look behind the abstraction, all Rule of Law means is that those who have the most authority tell you what to do by writing laws, instead of by shouting at you. It then becomes obvious that Rule of Law can't stop slavery, because the rulers can simply tell some people to be slaves by passing a law (which has actually happened before).

I don't know what dictionary you're using, but here are a few definitions from mine:

scalable - How well a hardware or software system can adapt to increased demands.

scalable - the ability of a product or network to accommodate growth

The ability to scale hardware and software to support larger or smaller volumes of data and more or less users.

the ability of a computer system to shrink or grow as requirements change