Indeed, although it's not an easy read, and it takes time for the horror of spending one's entire life, birth to death, in a concentration camp, starving and being tortured to really sink in.
It is amazing account from someone who was born inside of a NK prison camp, escaping the camp, then NK, and finally making his way to California. I totally recommend it. I couldn't stop reading it once I picked it up.
A more depressing read is "The Story of Oh" [0] - a South Korean who chose to move with his family to North Korea ... then, upon realizing how the facts on the ground differed from the fiction he'd been taught about the place, managed to escape. Without his family, mind you. His wife demanded he escape, the better to prevent others from following in his footsteps.
This is also the big killer for me. Its nice that they are open about their security http://www.jackdb.com/legal/security.html , but this wont help one bit if a production server gets compromised.
Its truly amazing to see such a large bounty for an open source project. Even though this bug poses no security threat, the reward offered is akin to those offered by the big power houses (FB, Microsoft, Google) for providing fixes to critical security issues.
Well to be fair in this case the bounty was setup before the recent rise in price. It's only getting attention now because it's now worth something.
But the donors could have backed out and did not, and there are other similarly-sized bounties in the bitcoin community (I currently make my living off of community donations as a bitcoin-core developer).
The two donors I see are gavin and theymos, the former receives bitcoins so the rise in price doesn't affect him, the latter paid nothing himself since those coins were all given to him. There's is also someone else that contributed about 1 BTC, but that cannot be taken back except wtogami himself negotiates with this donator to send it back.
Anyway, I think the attention is well deserved and I hope this contributes to a real fix. The current situation makes me not want to use the official bitcoin client under osx, at all. And this will be the case for a long time now, since I have no idea whether the bug will be correctly fixed.
Note: to my knowledge there has not been any loss of wallet due to this bug. You simply have to endure the annoyingly long process of re-indexing the block chain after a corruption.
The bug is unrelated to losing a wallet, just because the wallet is not even using leveldb (it is still at BDB). Your last sentence was the reason for my last earlier paragraph.
Don't set too much store in the MtGox price - it's not real money, because all their bank accounts are frozen. The value is high because it represents the substantial risk that nobody will get any of that money.
Yes, sometime back in spring or early summer I believe (based on my memory of #bitcon-dev conversations.. I don't frequent the scum-infested bitcointalk much).
It's an infuriating bug, there's no real reason for it, and no pattern as to what triggers it. Some users see it daily others never see it. It's been around long enough to seriously irritate some users, hence the bounty.
In particular, it seems to not manifest itself for the technical folks who are likely to actually solve it if they can reproduce it and yet be quite frequent for others.
I wouldn't be shocked if it ultimately turned out to be due to some setting that gurus would never have enabled. :)
Yeah lets be honest, it's probably something that's a pain-in-the-ass to solve. Unpredictable/difficult to repeat. Open-source devs need some motivation for this one clearly.
Although I agree with the point you are making, saying "you might be able to buy some crap on the internet with bitcoin" is slightly short of the truth. While you might not be able to live off 100% bitcoin purchases (although some people are doing it), acceptance is growing every day.
A lot of people who are claiming that you will need to pay a large % in fees in order to spend your coins are missing the point.... as bitcoin gains traction, you wont need to convert it to USD first.
Reviews are a tough spot. On the one hand, reviews can be very damaging to businesses, so it is important that some measures are in place to ensure that the review is honest and genuine, and on the other hand its important that consumers can openly review a product/company without being scared of reprisals.
Clearly, in this case, KlearGear are in the wrong, but I also think that there are cases where legitimate businesses have been seriously damaged by competitors, or just difficult customers writing unfair bad reviews.
Unfortunately the only solution to this I can think of would be a review of reviewers, which would just confound the problem.
> I also think that there are cases where legitimate businesses have been seriously damaged by competitors, or just difficult customers writing unfair bad reviews.
This is a big problem for small businesses and people alike, but the actual solution to this is the opposite of what most people's first instincts would be. Ironically, it's the existence of laws against libel/slander that makes fake reviews and false negative content online such a big deal for people going forward.
Because these laws exist, people are conditioned to believe that most of what they read online is true because otherwise legal action would be taken and it would get removed. But few people and small companies have the resources to track down every false review or fake negative comment and find out who did it and make legal challenges.
If you're an average small business, you don't have an easy way to mount a serious challenge against a site like RipOffReport when an unknown competitor starts writing nasty fake reviews about you online that you never shipped a product or whatever. If you're an average person, you have very little recourse if somebody goes and falsely writes that you have an STD on a site like Dirtyphonebook or whatever. People and companies with large amounts of resources are protected by libel/slander laws, but the average person or small company isn't really.
In a society with no laws against libel and slander, people would be a lot more skeptical about the veracity of negative comments that they see online and do a lot more research before buying a product or believing some negative comment was false.
We can talk a lot about better reviews and reviews of reviews but all of these are susceptible to the same issues.
"But few people and small companies have the resources"
And that's the key phrase in this entire thing. For everyone who says, "oh, they're in the right, they should hire an attorney", they're either more naturally litigious than I am or have never actually had to hire an attorney and prosecute a case in court. The name of the game is intimidation and harassment. KlearGear is absolutely betting that their customers don't have the resources to combat their meritless lawsuits.
My instinct is that online reviews are wildly unreliable and suspect. I certainly don't think they enjoy any sort of legal oversight.
I will take a large plurality as reliable, and someone able to write in the correct tone could certainly mislead me (that is, I will look at an individual review on its apparent merits), but I sure don't expect a couple of good or bad reviews to mean anything.
Also, the encyclopedia I ordered did not contain any murder mysteries, one star because I can't put no stars.
I don't think explicit "reviews of reviewers" is necessary, with enough data you can compute a trustworthiness score based on how their past reviews match up against other reviewers, or an Amazon style "Was this review helpful?" poll (which I suppose is a review of reviewers).
I find Amazon works pretty well. When you have tens of thousands of customers of a product not everyone is going to grok, some are going to call you a poopy head.
If me and my co-authors cultivate a critical mass of reviewers, respond to the bad reviews that genuinely misunderstood something, and have enough traffic on the pages to generate enough "useful" scores on reviews, it all works out in the end.
Computer printers enabling home publishing might make it harder to enforce libel laws, but a shift in enforcement difficulty need not require new laws.
If I invented a new sort of zip-lock baggy that was completely impermeable to smell, that would make the enforcement of several laws more difficult, but should my invention prompt new laws? No, that would be an overreaction.
Review of reviewers is totally the way to go! It sounds like a "now you have two problems" situation, but it really isn't. Starting from the one reviewer of reviewers you know you can trust (yourself) you can build out to a network of trusted reviewers.
If anyone's interested in working on open source solutions to this problem, feel free to email me. It's kind of my thing:)
Funny you mention this because a friend and I were sick of video game review sites leaving obviously paid for 10/10 reviews (here's looking at you, Eurogamer). So we put together plans to build a "review the reviewers" website where people could leave feedback on a particular reviewers integrity, honesty, trends and so on.
We never did finish it but I have lots of code, docs, ideas and research from that time and I'd be happy to help with your idea if you pursue it.
Yeah, a web of trust style weighting of friends-of-friends-of-friends isn't a bad idea at all. Current social networks doing that sort of thing tend to only care about immediate friends, which is only very narrowly useful. Good luck with your project.
I think Wallaby works differently by being a new plastic card you use and they dynamically route your charges to which ever registered card will give you the best return (cash back, airline points, etc).
There will be a lot of opposition (much of it valid) to these cards, but I really think its a step in the right direction. I can easily see this as a stepping stone to having your cards directly integrated into your mobile.
I find this a bit misleading. Their post mentions $25/month, but the email I received from New Relic asked me to sign up for a minimum of $199/month for 8 servers
Yes, I have to agree that the pricing is very misleading. How many startups have 8 servers? I would have though that 2-4 is more like the norm, in which case the price is more like $50 - $100 per server
the exact wording they use is "for as low as $25/month per host". because the Startup plan offers up to 8 hosts maximum and costs $199 regardless of number of hosts, their math checks out - but I agree that it was worded in a rather marketing weasel-esque way
1918 Born in the Eastern Cape
1943 Joined African National Congress
1956 Charged with high treason, but charges dropped after a four-year trial
1962 Arrested, convicted of incitement and leaving country without a passport, sentenced to five years in prison
1964 Charged with sabotage, sentenced to life
1990 Freed from prison
1993 Wins Nobel Peace Prize
1994 Elected first black president
1999 Steps down as leader
2001 Diagnosed with prostate cancer
2004 Retires from public life
2005 Announces his son has died of an HIV/Aids-related illness