Consider Adding a Filter to Your Randomly Generated CAPTCHAs - <AUTHOR> http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/8034/feedburnerhp1.jpg <comment><USER2> Email verification? Email verification is no filter! If you use an activation email, there really isn't a need for a captcha. Captchas are useful because users don't need to leave the current website, check their email, activate it, and come back -- they would have lost their thought inertia at that point, assuming they arrived at the verification step because they wanted to do something useful with whatever application. If I am missing the point, do explain; I fail to see something to consider to add from that picture. That captcha is also terribly breakable.

<comment><AUTHOR> To clarify, that was a popup to subscribe for email delivery of an RSS feed via Feedburner. I suppose they put the CAPTCHA in place in hopes of lowering the ability to abuse that feature for flooding.</comment></comment>


How to calculate Amazon Redshift pricing? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.panoply.io/data-engineers-guide-to-redshift-pricing <comment><USER2> This is interesting but how do I compare between Redshift, Bigquery and snowflake pricing?</comment>


Cappuccino on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2010/01/cappuccino-on-rails/ <comment><USER2> This looks pretty similar to Nick Small's CPActiveRecord: [http://github.com/nciagra/Cappuccino- Extensions/tree/master/...](http://github.com/nciagra/Cappuccino- Extensions/tree/master/CPActiveRecord/)

Was there any code borrowed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I was using CPActiveRecord for some time on my application before writing CR (I even contributed a couple of small things to his library). However, my application's needs outgrew that library and as I spoke with Nick he stated that it might take a rewrite on his part to facilitate them. That is when I decided to write a separate library.

There may be one or two lines of code borrowed, but more importantly I borrowed a lot of the good ideas Nick included (specifically, the notification system). I also borrowed ideas from ObjectiveResource as that project has a very similar goal.</comment></comment>


GoVPN 4.1: uses Argon2b (PHC winner) instead of PBKDF2 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.cypherpunks.ru/pipermail/govpn-devel/2015-November/000049.html <comment><USER2> Interesting features:

* Ability to hide packets length with the noise data.

* Ability to hide payload timestamps with constant packet rate traffic.</comment>


Y Combinator's Paul Graham: Dot-Com Bubble Was "Dumb Leading the Dumb" - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/02/17/businessinsider-y-combinators-paul-graham-dot-com-bubble-was-dumb-leading-the-dumb-2011-2.DTL

<comment><USER2> If you're sitting on a large chunk of a commodity (early stage equity) you're unlikely to go around saying that it costs too much.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that a whole sfgate article came out of a single comment on this site.

</comment><comment><USER4> News outlets have been picking up from HN very fast indeed.

</comment><comment><USER5> If there even was a bubble occurring it is only in the seed funding stage and not the IPO/late VC stage which ended up affecting much more than just entrepreneurs and investors.

The amount of money being invested/risked is much less than it was back in the 90s, and as Paul remarked the quality of entrepreneurs and investors is much better. Most likely lessons learned from the 90s

<comment><AUTHOR> Not to mention there is much more of a precedence to have business models now than there was back in the 90's. That's not to say everyone has one (ahem, Twitter) but it's better than just an idea on a napkin in 1999.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or at the very least, the unscrupulous leading the dumb.</comment>


Wisconsin voters... fancy ... governor's ability to ... veto ... with ... creativity - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/us/03wisconsin.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

<comment><USER2> !HN</comment>


Tallos II Workstations Starting to Appear - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/983738118431039488 <comment><USER2> Man, if they weren't so crazy expensive, I'd be really excited. Part of it is nostalgia for the weird old days of exotic architecture Unix systems.

As I think about it though, there's no way I'd have ever paid for an SGI, Sun, RS/6k, Alpha (well, maybe Alpha) system back in the day. Those were also crazy expensive.

<comment><USER3> The hope is for it to become more popular and trigger economies of scale and become affordable to common joes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice! Should be Talos with one L, though.

</comment><comment><USER5> They're not exactly cheap.</comment>


Google's copyright win against Oracle is in danger on appeal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/googles-copyright-win-against-oracle-is-in-danger-on-appeal/ <comment><USER2> I really strongly believe that APIs should not be copyrightable, and I say this as someone who has spent literally years of my life and creative energy designing APIs.

I think designing APIs is an art, and I think it is creative. But ultimately I think APIs are much more like protocols, file formats, or languages than they are like fixed works. Copyright API documentation all you like, but the day that people can control who is allowed to speak a language that they invented is the day that you cede control of everything to incumbents.

What if SCO could really have sued IBM on the basis that they owned the actual _APIs_ to UNIX? What if you couldn't actually say "#define ENOENT 1" _in your own project_ without violating SCO's copyrights?

<comment><USER3> SCO tried but everything had been permissively licensed or had not been properly treated when you still needed to apply copyright notices everywhere for copyright to apply.

There is also the counteracting market force that single source illiberally licensed API's are unappealing to users so in many cases granting rights to other implementations can be commercially desirable for the creator of the API. Mono's existance encourages .Net and C# adoption.

Also there is the distinction between copying an API to duplicate it and USING the API to develop a program against (this would the speaking a language aspect). I would argue that using the API would never be infringement but would in all circumstances I could imagine would be fair use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really torn on the topic of API copyrightability, and watching this nervously.

On one hand, haven't we all worked with (or built) APIs which seem remarkable in their structure and simplicity? The best of the best seem like unambiguously creative works.

On the other hand, I don't want to work in a world where simply conforming to an interface specification could be illegal. What a nightmare that would be.

<comment><USER5> I don't see the big nightmare here. Copyrights aren't a "hidden landmine" issue like patents can be. It's not like you can accidentally copy an API, and even if you did, independent creation is a defense to copyright infringement.

Being able to copyright APIs would just mean that everyone would be incentivized to switch to open-source APIs with clear licensing terms (BSD, GPL, etc). I don't see that as a bad thing.

<comment><USER6> libeditline[1] is a BSD-licensed implementation of the GNU Readline[2] API. Do you think this should be considered copyright infringement?

[1] [http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/editline/](http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/editline/)

[2] [http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html](http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oracle has a reliance on uncopyrightable APIs. If these copyrights were enforced, they would would have to radically change their SQL semantics to avoid infringing "copyrighted" APIs from prior SQL databases.

They have also taken APIs from free software and written proprietary implementations. They would need to release entire huge projects under GPL.

<comment><USER8> I don't think either of those things are true.

First, SQL is a standardized language. It's not copyrighted, and has an ISO standard. Anybody can implement a SQL database and not run into any copyright problems. They _might_ run into problems if they implemented proprietary Oracle extensions in their new DB, but even that seems unlikely.

Next, even if APIs are copyrightable, it doesn't imply Oracle would have to release anything as open source. For one, I'm not sure any open source projects would sue over it. And even if they did, Oracle could simply stop distributing the software.

<comment><USER2> > SQL is a standardized language

What does being standardized have to do with it? MP3 and h.264 are standardized, that doesn't prevent them from being heavily patented. Likewise being standardized wouldn't prevent an API from being copyrighted.

> It's not copyrighted

If APIs were copyrightable, they would automatically be copyrighted when they were written down in a fixed form. That's the way that copyright works; you don't have to take special action to copyright something, it is automatically copyrighted when you create it. Registering a copyright puts you in a stronger position legally but it is not required to actually have a copyright.

See the danger now? If APIs were copyrightable, every API would automatically be copyrighted. Implementing an existing API would be copyright infringement unless you had a license.

<comment><USER9> Just to reinforce your point: Standard docs are already copyrighted. SCSI specs and some ITU specs aren't free. Seems that the more niche the standard goes, the more expensive it gets. (Although if you write your own standard doc based off an implementation's actions, that should be OK, right?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> However this goes, I will be sad to see the lack of coverage from groklaw that made the case so understandable last time.

<comment><USER11> I miss it dearly, as I do miss PJ's apt but still readable analysis of complex lawsuits. It was especially powerful against paid shills or any other articles that valued money over facts.

I always hoped it'd resume someday, or rise as a phoenix from its ashes. Where did the community go after the sign-off?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > By grabbing parts of APIs, Google took "the most important, the most > appealing" parts of Java, Oracle's lawyer told a three-judge panel.

... this made me laugh. I find Javas APIs horrific and muddled. Surely not one of the "most appealing" parts?

<comment><USER13> It's not that Java APIs are particularly good, but that they exist and are massive in scope. Sun put a ton of work into designing and documenting these APIs, and morally speaking they should be compensated by having some kind of ownership over it.

If the appeal finds for Oracle I'll laugh... Google at least hastened Sun's demise by being too cheap to pay for Java, then they were too cheap to buy Sun when it was for sale. If they end up having to pay Oracle for it, that's karma at work.

<comment><USER2> > Sun put a ton of work into designing and documenting these APIs, and morally > speaking they should be compensated by having some kind of ownership over > it.

And how much work did Tim Berners-Lee put into HTTP/HTML, the Unicode Consortium into Unicode, the W3C into XML, etc? The Java ecosystem depends heavily on these and many more. What kind of licensing agreement does Oracle have with the W3C? If you can own copyright on an API, I can't imagine what argument you would use to justify implementing a protocol without licensing it first.

Some parts of the Java API implement APIs that others have designed. Should Oracle need a licensing agreement with the W3C to implement the DOM?

Some parts of the Java API are thin wrappers around existing APIs. Is the Java API a derivative work of CORBA? Does Oracle need a licensing agreement with OMG?

<comment><USER3> That API's can be copyrighted doesn't mean that they can't be licensed, even freely.

Tim Berners-Lee specifically granted permission and encouraged people to adopt the WWW and create their own implementations. The W3C allows people to use its standards freely too (I'm not sure if there is a formal license grant or not).

I don't know the status of CORBA but it is plausible that Sun/Oracle did sign agreements to adopt those specifications or that they were properly granted to all comers.

Sum encouraged adoption of Java but was always specific and controlling of the distribution of runtimes and development kits. There were always licenses to agree to and real contracts available to people who wanted to develop their own Java platforms. They were quite strict on compatibility and what versions should be supported on what sorts of devices. They did release the JDK under the GPL. If Google had declared that they were using the GPL licensed code and were obeying the terms then they would have been entitled to proceed but they did not do that. They chose to develop the incompatible Dalvik to deliberately avoid Sun's contractual obligations but still benefit from the API design, documentation and existing developer experience expensively created by Sun.

<comment><USER2> > Tim Berners-Lee specifically granted permission and encouraged people to > adopt the WWW and create their own implementations.

> I'm not sure if there is a formal license grant or not

Where is the actual license? If formats are truly copyrightable, then general "encouragement" is not sufficient, you would need an explicit license, as every open source project has to allow copying of copyrighted code. Where is the actual document that says you can use HTML without infringing the copyright of Tim Berners-Lee or the W3C?

The answer is that there isn't one, because no one thinks that formats themselves are copyrightable.

> They chose to develop the incompatible Dalvik to deliberately avoid Sun's > contractual obligations but still benefit from the API design, documentation > and existing developer experience expensively created by Sun.

Writing books about your technology does not mean you somehow own the experience that people gain from reading them. Spending a lot of money does not entitle you to exert however much control you feel you deserve.

"Intellectual property" is a balance between the interests of creators and the interests of society. Giving first movers complete control over APIs, formats, and languages that become popular would enable a new wave of rent-seeking, very much like the patent trolling we see now.

<comment><USER3> > Where is the actual license?

OK I decided to actually look it up. Here it is: [http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Policy.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Policy.html)

"The definition of protocols such as HTTP and data formats such as HTML are in the public domain and may be freely used by anyone."

So back when originally developed TBL seems to have felt the need to declare the public domain nature (implying to me that it was NOT an obvious default).

> Writing books about your technology does not mean you somehow own the > experience that people gain from reading them.

I agree. The creation and design of the API is what allowed Sun to do that. The documentation is merely part of the _why_ Google decided to copy Java and many of it's libraries rather than develop their own API or use a freely licensed one. [Edit: I didn't really mean to agree with "owning the experience" bit but it does give them some rights.]

> Spending a lot of money does not entitle you to exert however much control > you feel you deserve.

Agree. Copyright gives specific rights and there are also fair use rights that should possibly be strengthened.

> "Intellectual property" is a balance between the interests of creators and > the interests of society.

I largely agree. I would like it the case that I could fully agree but I don't think that balance currently exists (especially on copyright durations and I think for software the source should be published or escrowed and then released when copyright expires). I also don't like discussing "Intellectual property" as that leads to sloppy thinking and overbroad claims, it is better to discuss the specific types, patents, copyright, design patents, trademarks separately. The balance is also set by legislation and the judiciary should not have that much discretion (although they should have on fair use issues).

> Giving first movers complete control over APIs, formats, and languages that > become popular would enable a new wave of rent-seeking, very much like the > patent trolling we see now.

The trade off is the incentive to create and promote new platforms and the breadth of the right to implement them. For me this is an issue of fair use and competition law plus market solutions of people avoiding platforms where alternative implementations are not possible. There is a useful discussion to be had about fair use rights to copyrighted API's but I'm not sure the incompatible Dalvik would be fair use even if a compatible alternative was, we are deep in the grey area here.

I would add as I have in other places that you need to consider how you would feel if it was old Sun in the Oracle role and MS in the Google role? Would this not be an egregious case of "embrace, extend extinguish"?

<comment><USER2> > "The definition of protocols such as HTTP and data formats such as HTML are > in the public domain and may be freely used by anyone."

The _definitions_ : I'm pretty sure this means that you can copy the documents themselves. This distinguishes it from standards documents by bodies like ISO where the standards documents _themselves_ are copyright.

Here's another example: in the SCO lawsuit against IBM, why did they not attempt to claim copyright infringement over APIs? That would have been a much easier case to make than copyright infringement of the code, as Linux does in fact "copy" the APIs of UNIX.

Also, as another poster pointed out, if APIs were copyrightable then BSD UNIX would never have happened.

> The trade off is the incentive to create and promote new platforms and the > breadth of the right to implement them.

No one would be incentivized to create platforms unless they could lock out competitors? WINE/ReactOS hasn't stopped Microsoft from developing the Windows API. Mono hasn't stopped them from developing .NET. Companies that create platforms get natural benefits from developing platforms: it puts them in a position of leadership and ahead of everybody else.

> I would add as I have in other places that you need to consider how you > would feel if it was old Sun in the Oracle role and MS in the Google role? > Would this not be an egregious case of "embrace, extend extinguish"?

Copyright law is not a tool for preventing anticompetitive business practices. It's not copyright's job to prevent "embrace, extend, extinguish."

But if Microsoft (for example) decided to implement the Dart APIs as their development environment for apps on Windows Phone, I don't see the problem with that.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" would be if Google took a platform that already had a J2ME ecosystem and started distributing their own J2ME SDK that was targeted at the same developers and devices and introduced proprietary extensions that would make the Google-J2ME apps incompatible with the Oracle-J2ME apps.

<comment><USER3> SCO? They did. They just didn't own rights that had not already been given up by their predecessors.

Check your BSD history. Various actions and omissions of copyright registration and explicit copyright notices which were then required led to the BSD settlement.

I didn't say there could be no incentive without copyright but that it is part of the balance. .NET doesn't support the argument that much though, it could be seen as a counter reaction to losing the legal action over the J++ embrace, extend, extinguish attempt against Sun's Java.

I see embrace, extend in a wider way but that isn't a key argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like some jurisprudential butterfly chasing.

I'm inclined to think Alsup's basis of "sequence, structure, and organization" not being copyrightable is far too broad a change, with ramifications beyond this specific case. (This is what allows lists, like a phone book, to be copyrightable, even though the numbers are public).

I'd have thought the reverse engineering exceptions were a more apt basis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality) However, that's where Oracle's argument about the "fan-base" comes in: it wasn't purely interoperability between machines that Google wanted, but the installed base of _developers_. I haven't followed the exact policy considerations for reverse engineering, but it seems to me that the training of engineers to work on a particular machine is part-and-parcel of interoperability (for example, third-party after-market car parts - not only do they fit, but mechanics already know _how_ to fit them; a more relevant example is IBM mainframes/minicomputers being copied, where programmers already knew the platform).

So, the higher court's consideration of the bigger picture may have serious financial consequences for Google and Oracle. I think Oracle will still lose, just on a different basis.

It's good to be appellate judge.

</comment><comment><USER15> Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is backing Oracle in this appeal, because apparently Microsoft thinks that copyright on APIs = good.

<comment><USER6> Of course they do. If APIs can be copyrighted, then projects like Wine and Mono become illegal.

<comment><USER16> _Director of the open source technology centre at Microsoft Tom Hanrahan said the Community Promise allows projects like Mono to fully support its technology. "The type of action Oracle is taking against Google over Java is not going to happen," Hanrahan said._

 _Microsoft's Community Promise has made the .Net runtime and C# specifications available to Miguel de Icaza and the Mono project developers._

 _"If a .Net port to Android was through Mono it would fall under that agreement," he said._

[http://www.techworld.com.au/article/358564/microsoft_won_t_s...](http://www.techworld.com.au/article/358564/microsoft_won_t_stop_net_android/)

More at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_\(software\))

<comment><USER9> Xamarin actually ported Android to C#:

[http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/](http://blog.xamarin.com/android- in-c-sharp/)

And has some cute benchmarks to show off for it.

But go one more level deep: Despite Microsoft's Community Promise, many places and legal teams will still view a potential threat if MS has a copyright on APIs used in Mono (not to mention patents).

It's a great win-win for Microsoft. They get to trumpet their PR and gain face with open source people, as well as deflect some criticism. But they know it'll still not hurt them as much as if they officially blessed Mono with a full, proper, transitive license.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, I've been trying to be less cynical lately. If someone does something good I prefer to take it, not dig for nefarious motives.

<comment><USER9> That's probably a great life outlook to deal with individuals and probably helps your personal relationships. But it seems incredibly naive to give corporations the same treatment.

Read the actual promise[1].

The promise only covers patent claims from Microsoft on those technologies, and only if you're not engaged in any patent lawsuit with them. So, if you're some random company that happens to encroach on Microsoft's territory in another area, but you happened to use Mono, they can strike at your usage of Mono due to your work in another area.

Automotive? Health? Entertainment? "Social"? Telecommunications? Advertising? Resource planning? Imaging/mapping? Security? Aeronautics? Anything related to computing?

All those and more are areas that Microsoft works on. I can't imagine any legal team being able to assert that their company will _never_ use Microsoft IP in any area - it's just too vast.

Example: You use Mono to implement some coordination software for networking gear - that sounds "safe". Microsoft then publishes research and obtains patents on their own work on networking (already done) from Azure and MSR (or they buy some large dead company's portfolio). Microsoft now has IP all over your area of choice, and as soon as there's any fight, you lose your Promise over Mono and now have a ton more claims to defend. Oops.

This isn't really even cynicism - it's spelled out very clearly in the promise.

Edit: In the Google Android .NET issue: Yes, Google can go use .NET for Android, no problem. Until Google gets in a fight over a plethora of other patents (say, advertising or other phone related patents). At that point, Google loses its promise for Mono and MS has a lucrative ground to gain.

Also, copyright issues are NOT included in the Community Promise. So MS still wins by making APIs copyrightable. They might extend the CP to cover copyright, but those copyright issues are still there as soon as someone fights MS over anything else. Totally strengthens MS's position.

As far as .NET on Android - OF COURSE, MS won't "stop" that. That'd be a major win for MS and hurt Oracle/Java. The .NET port would fall under the agreement, but I've already demonstrated how quickly that agreement can roll back. Google adopting .NET is a good technical move, but gives MS a massive advantage.

That said, app developers using MonoDroid are probably reasonably safe so long the apps they make are of relatively low strategic value to MS. If all of Google Play's apps were made on MonoDroid, Google would be in a terrible position.

1: [http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/programs/c...](http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/programs/community- promise/default.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My recollection was that the judge in this case pursued a very clever strategy. There were two questions to be decided: are APIs copyrightable and did Google infringe. The jury were asked to assume the API was copyrighted and then decide whether Google infringed that copyright. The jury found no infringement. Then the judge ruled that APIs were not copyrightable.

So even if the judge's decision is overturned the jury's decision still stands and there was no infringement.

<comment><USER18> The jury found that there was infringement.

<comment><USER17> In don't believe it did. [https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...](https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/3 --10-cv-03561/Oracle_America_Inc._v._Google_Inc./1190/)

<comment><USER18> You have linked to the PATENT ruling, not the COPYRIGHT ruling

[http://es.scribd.com/doc/92725855/completed-verdict-form- in-...](http://es.scribd.com/doc/92725855/completed-verdict-form-in-oracle- google)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought Sun released most of Java code under open-source licenses years ago[1]. Are there key parts of Java which are closed-source and only those parts are disputed? If that's the case it shouldn't be very hard to replace those parts.

I'm not familiar with the Java ecosystem. I appreciate if you could correct me.

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java- trap.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html)

<comment><USER20> It's released under GPL, and Google is trying to avoid putting GPL in userland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is interesting. I think there will be a lot of fallout if they find that APIs are copyrightable. Until now, I think the industry has been acting as though APIs are not copyrightable. The next question will be what actually constitutes an API? For example, are Unix programs like "mv" and "grep" parts of an API?

</comment><comment><USER22> Oracle's "fan base"?

Only a lawyer...

<comment><USER23> Not to mention that it wouldn't have been _Oracle 's_ fan base, but _Sun 's_ fan base. Android 1.0 was released in September 2008. Oracle bought Sun in April 2009.

Of course, Sun wouldn't have sued in the first place...

<comment><USER24> > Of course, Sun wouldn't have sued in the first place...

Yes they would, but were out of money.

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator- ja...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-james- gosling-google-totally-slimed-sun/)

"Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This will only accelerate the development of Dart by Google and push it onto the Android platform.

</comment><comment><USER26> You're all talking as if Google are the good guys here. Whoever wins, we all lose.

<comment><USER27> Why? Is Android so bad?

<comment><USER24> No, but Google just played a Microsoft card and took advantage that Sun was too weak financially to sue them as they did with Microsoft.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoins reached $300 - <AUTHOR> Here are the charts: http://bitcoinity.org/markets A screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/kW1CJz2.jpg<p>And a link to the front page of WSJ's financial section today: http://m.imgur.com/4bcGGZG <comment><USER2> Damn. Sometimes I can't believe it. I have been following bitcoin quite closely for over 18 months now. The ecosystem is growing in ways only a few bold people have predicted. Fundamentally, it is about belief and trust. The protocol has largely proven itself. People are starting to believe in bitcoin. This is why the price is going up.

For those who say "It isn't being used as a currency!" here is my response:

Bitcoin excels as a secure protocol for tracking account balances in a decentralized, seemingly untamperable fashion, as well as transferring value very quickly to anywhere in the world at the sole, uncensorable discretion of the owner. It is both a payment protocol and a distributed ledger. A lot of people want these unique feautures, even if they can't buy groceries with it yet. Those types of merchants will always be the last to adopt.

Bitcoin also has the pontential to be used in diverse ways as "progammable money". It has a built-in API, and features like timelock, mutli-entity transaction signing (built-in escrow), and others that I don't fully understand. An AI bot could utilize bitcoin (might have trouble with a bank account!).

Also, see gold and its $8 trillion of largely made-up valuation (not stemming from industrial/ornamental demand). You don't see gold owners buying things with a few shavings ;) Bitcoin is far superior to gold in almost every way (it isn't quite as shiny tho). If society can make up several trillion dollars of monetary valuation for gold, then I definitely can picture bitcoin snagging a pretty decent slice (right now it is only 1/3,000 the size gold).

People recognize this potential, and thus choose to invest. The first mover advantange is massive. Network effects are very important - it will take quite the innovation to unseat bitcoin, and it has to be something that can't be simply copied/integrated into the existing protocol. The whole thing is sort of a self-fullfilling positive feedback loop. I'm a cautiously strong proponent, and find it absolutely fascinating to watch. These kind of events don't unfold that often.

TL;DR - magic internet money!

Sorry for the multiple edits. I wrote this on my phone.

<comment><USER3> i wish bitcoin's equating with gold is going to last - but i believe that because bitcoin's uncontrollability (from the banker's point of view), it will be stamped out as soon as it threatens fiat currencies as the dominant means of transfer.

<comment><USER4> Stamping out a global, decentralized currency with mass adoption won't be easy. Even if bitcoin will be legal in 10% of countries it would be enought to bridge bitcoin-fiat exchanges.

<comment><USER5> > Stamping out a global, decentralized currency with mass adoption won't be > easy. Even if bitcoin will be legal in 10% of countries it would be enought > to bridge bitcoin-fiat exchanges.

Especially if trading would just move to Tor-like channels if this happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area If I had money in bitcoin I'd find this movement terrifying. It is not correlated with broader economic movements or the inflation rate of USD, and has all the classic hallmarks of a bubble, including true believers telling everyone it is different this time, increasingly wild oscillations, and exponential growth.

I find bitcoin really interesting, love the idea of a cryptocurrency, and also find the idea of a deflationary currency interesting. I've no argument with that side of it. Obviously there are issues with things like exchanges which seem to be almost entirely run by amateurs who think that a VPS or leased server is secure enough for financial transactions, but those problems could go away in time, they are not inherent to the currency, though they're another reason to be cautious at present.

However there are a few issues with the use of the currency which can't easily be fixed. What I find more troubling is the commitment to anonymity and lack of accountability from the creators - it is designed to allow anonymous transactions, and the users seem to be resistant to regulation. Those two things mean people can engage in bitcoin theft, fraud, laundering, cornering the market, setting up bogus or insecure exchanges/banks, with impunity and anonymity. Without proper regulation, insurance, compensation, which means identification of users and verification of transactions and everything that goes with that, I can't see bitcoin spreading beyond enthusiasts.

I wouldn't use it for anything important because of the lack of regulation and controls, but do think it represents something of the future of currencies, after our latest experiment in hyper-inflationary fiat runs its course (see Fiat Money Inflation in France for a previous experiment). It'll be interesting to see if other cryptocurrencies are born which take a different direction and attempt to build in accountability and responsibility to secure transactions and allow them to be policed effectively by tying them to real world identity. Anyone know of any?

<comment><USER6> Look at Bitcoin closing price on a log scale: [http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=940&m=mtgoxU...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=940&m=mtgoxUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=360&i=&c=0&s=&e=&Prev=&Next=&t=C&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=1&p=0&)

Not so scary anymore! From what I understand, people should be looking at this sort of data on a log scale.

<comment><USER7> Why?

<comment><USER6> Take a look at this explanation: [http://www.fool.com/foolfaq/foolfaqcharts.htm](http://www.fool.com/foolfaq/foolfaqcharts.htm)

<comment><USER7> Ah, that makes perfect sense. With a logarithmic chart, each change is seen in the context of the current value. Each change is not equal to every other change. When bitcoin is worth $1, and it goes up one more $1, that's a much bigger change than when at $300 it goes to $301 but to have the line the same length is kind of misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Somewhere buried on my hard drive I have a fraction of a bitcoin that people were giving out for free when bitcoin first came out to encourage adoption.

I really need to find it, it's actually worth money now...

ps. that pizza is now worth $3 Million

<comment><USER9> What about Ebay announcing that they might accept Bitcoins?

<comment><USER10> I've been buying up in the last week (previously I was in at 5, 10, 12$ and sold at the last peak at $240) because I think PayPal will jump in soonish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When Silkroad went down I expected bitcoin to take quite a slump but what has happened is contrary. I am not implying that anonymous transaction s for illegal use are the only thing bitcoins are good for but its my guess that it forms a major part of the group that actually use bitcoins for buying stuff. I am not sure why would anyone would get troubled in buying bitcoins for purchasing rather than punching a CC number. What is pushing its value, I am not sure but I am really spectical that it has to do with bitcoin's popularity.

<comment><USER12> Most of the people of the world can't really have a bank account, let alone be eligible for a credit (card). With Bitcoin you only need internet access.

Most of the people of the world can't really save either. Cash loses value over time, gold is hard to validate and keep safe, and is even banned in lots of places. Bitcoin to the rescue! Now everyone can start saving, and even be rewarded for that.

I could go on all day long, the benefits are endless. Just live in a shitty country for some time and you'll figure it out pretty fast.

<comment><USER13> _Most of the people of the world can 't really have a bank account, let alone be eligible for a credit (card). With Bitcoin you only need internet access._

Yeah cause internet access and a modern computer are _waaaaay_ more common than bank accounts or prepaid credit cards....

<comment><USER14> They are, if you define modern cellphones as a "modern computer".

Digging around, I found they're almost equal actually, and cellphone users vastly outnumber bank account holders (cell phone users exceed toilet access !!!).

50% of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution.

60% of adults worldwide have internet access, with 39% having home internet access (the remainder having shared or limited internet access).

80% of adults have cell phone access.

Sources:

[http://econ.worldbank.org/](http://econ.worldbank.org/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage)

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/159815/home-internet-access- remai...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/159815/home-internet-access-remains- reach-worldwide.aspx)

newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/25/more-people-have-cell-phones-than-toilets-u-n- study-shows/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bitcoins should lose 3 zeros, like many countries do to their currencies.

So 1 new Bitcoin = 0.001 old Bitcoins = $0.3

I think I'd like that more than just starting naming them something else all of the sudden, and call them Satoshis or whatever, and then when the Bitcoin reaches $10,000 we'll probably have to use new names yet again.

Cutting the zeros could be a little confusing at first, but I think less confusing than starting talking about Satoshis, or mCoins or whatever, all of the sudden.

<comment><USER16> >Bitcoins should lose 3 zeros, like many countries do to their currencies.

I've never heard of that, although the opposite has been done plenty of times. But that's rarely a sign of a healthy economy, most of the time it's done out of desperation I would think.

<comment><USER17> It was very 'popular' in the 80's and 90's for countries coming out of high inflation. Off the top of my head, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Bulgaria all cut three or 4 zeros from their currency to make the numbers easier to handle and to try to mark a psychological end to previous inflation.

Zimbabwe did it about once every other year or so back in the mid 2000's.

<comment><USER18> Mathematically speaking you are talking about dividing but GP talks about multiplying. That I've never heard of too.

<comment><USER17> Sorry. Realized I completely misread both posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To the moon! ┗(°0°)┛

<comment><USER20> Amen.

<comment><USER19> $320 now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In this thread - people confusing up arrows with "good".

(Rapid deflation is not a great thing for a currency in general)

<comment><USER22> I'm wondering, is it as bad for a currency that still rather rarely get's used exclusively? I don't have a lot of economic knowledge (only what I learned in high school, though one of my majors was economics & politics; Germany, school until 13th grade) but it just seems to me that not all the normal rules would apply in the case of bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looking at the chart it doesn't seem as volatile as mainstream media leads us to believe.

<comment><USER24> Your average currency pair moves less than 1% on almost all days. Moves above 1% are rare and days with moves of several percent are extremely rare and occur a couple of times a year at most. BTC, on the other hand, may be worth anything from 250 to 60 USD a day. That is the reason why BTC as a currency is of little use. You cannot do serious business with something like this unless you immediately hedge all of your exposure. In a larger organisation that would be impossible and, on the other hand, only means that someone else is holding the bag for the next crash.

BTC is driven by little to no fundamental data. Its exchange rate is subject to pure mass psychology which is why it repeatedly goes through boom and bust cycles. This is not going to stop unless something like a real BTC economy of non-trivial size develops. But I think it very unlikely for this to happen for the aforementioned reason of volatility and the fact that BTC is by design deflationary. BTC's deflationary properties would choke off any such economic system that is based on this crypto currency.

All in all, I am of the opionion that BTC is an interesting experiment and a case study in speculative behaviour. The difference compared to former manias (see [1] for historic examples) is that in BTC the process plays itself out at an extremely accelarated pace. Maybe this is even what the creator(s) intended. Maybe they created a purely electronic ecosystem of speculative behaviour to be able to study and better understand the phenomenon of financial bubbles. This would certainly explain the 'Satoshi' entity's non- interference.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds)

<comment><USER23> This is the kind of response I wanted to invoke - that you for your insight!

I guess the closest 'real' currency examples would be something like [http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=ZWD&to=USD&view=10Y](http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=ZWD&to=USD&view=10Y)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wouldn't say it's a bubble just yet, because it's too close to the last ramping which was a response to the Cyprus confiscations. This is just a response to what many would perceive as the beginnings of capital controls in the USA... it's probably the tail end of that. Another "Bitcoin Bubble" to me would be around $500 in the next few days... thus entailing some burst or large correction.

[http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/10/17/jpmorgan- ch...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/10/17/jpmorgan-chase-denies- new-capital-controls-on-accounts/)

A better word would be "recapitulation."

<comment><USER26> Last rally started at $14 and crashed into $100. This time we started at $140 around Silk Road shutdown. If this history repeats itself, the bubble may crash into whopping $1000.

<comment><USER25> The main argument I heard against bitcoin from a Russian tycoon during the Cyprus shenanigans for bitcoin being a good store of value was that there was no quick way to liquidate large sums of bitcoin if you wanted to (I presume into some fiat currency for spending.) An interesting point: it wasn't really about the currency losing value it was about liquidity. But the counter- thought is that it's better having a store of value that one can't spend than not having anything at all! At least time is on your side with bitcoin in terms of liquidity, it's not with fiat if you look at capital controls on the increase. Capital controls are an issue especially if you want to move between countries. Anyone with $100mil+ and not in bed with government should move into bitcoin and get a good anonymizer .. the rest of us just get a free ride. Assume some goverment will then come after (if not those bitcoins) then you. And so the end game of bitcoins is when goverment ends up with most of them (or at least wanting them.)

<comment><USER26> Many people bet on Bitcoin becoming world money. Then you don't need to "liquidate" it at all. At the same time, market evolves: the more people invest tomorrow, the more btc you will be able to liquidate.

When Bitcoin becomes a world currency, then capital controls wouldn't matter.

<comment><USER25> I know that. Bitcoin's main risk is that it can make a person's fortune known, and accessible (or rather vulnerable.)

"You have 50,000 bitcoins.. transfer them to me now or alternatively do xxxx now .. or else." In fact some sort of time-lock or trusted partner would be a good busines idea, so that someone couldn't just come with a gun to your head. It can't become a world currency because it makes people too personally vulnerable... at least as it stands now, but it's a really good start.

<comment><USER26> People can find out about your coins the same way as they find out how much gold you have.

<comment><USER27> What website would you go to to find out how much gold I hold?

<comment><USER26> What website will tell you how much BTC do I hold? If you can trace from some exchange or a merchant my identity linked to some bitcoins, you can equally do that with a gold dealer. Of course, you can see where bitcoins are moved, but that won't tell you much: they could be equally sold or simply relocated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hate BitCoin or like it. Let's agree, nobody can explain this; and nobody can predict BitCoin value or usage.

Some top HN members criticized BitCoin heavily. I, for one, invested $0 in BitCoin.

But we can be sure about something: Bitcoin is weird, new and innovative. It's something completely new and has no rules. The game is open. How the market will react will not depend on your limited (or wide) experience.

Bitcoin can go all the way down to $0 and the rest is history. It can go up and widely used that it changes history. I'll be just watching though.

<comment><USER26> 1\. Bitcoin can be explained if you take time and study it. It has no new or strange constructs in it. Hash functions and digital signatures were around for decades. You may also like this glossary: [https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY...](https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY.md)

2\. Bitcoin has rules and those rules are strictly followed and very strictly specified in actual software.

<comment><USER29> The block size blockchain fork was resolved on an ad hoc basis. There was nothing in the software to deal with it. Miners lost rewards over it (or at least, wasted cycles).

<comment><USER26> Software has bugs. They need to be fixed and some people may lose money. This story only proves that incentives are correctly working in favour of everyone: miners _voluntarily_ chose to lose rewards and stay compatible with the older network to not shake confidence in it.

The point is not to have a perfect system (which is impossible), but to have proper motivations for everyone to play along instead of cheating and stealing.

<comment><USER29> Well, now we are running away from "strictly followed" and "very strictly specified".

I guess I would be happy if you always posted a disclaimer with such claims, something like "But of course all software has bugs and who knows how severely a given bug in the bitcoin software will impact the network".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Awesome. I wish (as always) I hadn't sold mine earlier. But if I didn't I would probably sold them now and wait to see what happens.

Thing is, this fluctuations are not connected with any sort of events that make sense or justify the price sky-rocketing which makes me think that the whole thing is driven, manually.

When the whale leaves the sea, BTC will turn into peanuts. Till then...

<comment><USER31> It's something of a paradox isn't it: If nobody had ever sold their bitcoins in return for something else, then there would be no market for bitcoins at all and bitcoins would be irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It seems to me the real price is lower as depicted by Coinbase or CampBX which have a stable and reliable system, unlike MtGox at the moment. I think the ~6% higher price on MtGox is a reflection of people's lack of trust in MtGox being able to provide withdrawals in a reliable and timely fashion.

</comment><comment><USER33> So, I don't understand. Why does bitcoin have such high deflation?

Is this just because there has been a constant stream of people switching their traditional currencies for bitcoins at a rate faster than bitcoins can be mined?

Presumably at some point bitcoin will stop being deflationary if it ever wants to be useful as a currency. When does that happen?

Why do people buy bitcoins if it isn't really useful as a currency yet? I mean, there are supposedly 3.5 billion USD worth of bitcoins in existence, but if I want to buy any sort of physical product or pay for utilities, I have to use a traditional currency.

Currently it appears that bitcoins are most popularly used for less than legal purposes (payment for drugs, payment for services to avoid taxes, payment for blackhat services). Does this mean that by buying into bitcoin, I'm essentially providing USD to these black market activities which might not have had USD to begin with?

Many questions I don't understand...

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there any serious research paper on BTC (and not an enthusiast blog post)?

<comment><USER35> Yes, it was originally proposed in a paper. [http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> it fails as a store of value and therefore is not money which is obvious given its volatility. Bitcoin is best described as a computer programme which sells itself on features written to provide assets to those with the mindset desiring such assets - libertarians, those anti fiat currencies, Austrian economists (more recently now gold is letting them down) etc... Such mindset are sure to only increase given the Wall St ownership of the Federal reserve so Bitcoin will continue to sell until its technology is made obsolte. If that takes years then bitcoin $100,000 soon enough but if tomorrow then hello bitcoin $0

<comment><USER37> What would make BTC obsolete?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Brace for impact.

</comment><comment><USER39> This reminds me increasing at gold last year.

</comment><comment><USER40> where do you personally buy/sell BTC ?

<comment><USER41> The easiest for the US is coinbase.com. Unless you want to buy a lot. But they are not an exchange so you can't setup buy/sell orders.

<comment><USER42> Not really if you want to trade. They are playing safe instead of having balances in USD and BTC so that you don't need an ACH for each buy/sell, which takes a week.</comment></comment></comment>


Report: Most Americans have no real choice in internet providers - <AUTHOR> https://ilsr.org/report-most-americans-have-no-real-choice-in-internet-providers/ <comment><USER2> Seriously. I don't understand why there isn't a movement to regulate ISP's like utilities at this point. Why aren't mayors and governors running on this as a major plank?

ISP investments, profits and pricing would all get regulated by the municipality. Performance is monitored and guaranteed.

I've lived in many, many apartments in NYC and each building has only ever had one choice -- Spectrum (was Time Warner) or Optimum. And it's always the same -- it's $24.99-39.99 at first, then after a year it's jacked up to $49.99-54.99, then another year up to $69.99.

It used to be you'd call to threaten to cancel and they'd re-lower it. But they haven't agreed to do that for over 3 years now -- they'll just let you cancel. They know you don't have a choice.

ISP's are so obviously by now a utility like water, gas and electric. Why aren't we treating them that way?

<comment><USER3> > Seriously. I don't understand why there isn't a movement to regulate ISP's > like utilities at this point. Why aren't mayors and governors running on > this as a major plank?

Who do you think gave them these monopolies in the first place?

<comment><USER4> Your local power, water, trash, etc company's have a local monopoly and serious regulation. Internet just has the monopoly bit.

<comment><USER5> My local trash company, in fact, does not have a monopoly. The city I left to move to where I am now implemented a monopoly trash service shortly after I left, and gave my street to a trash hauler that is quite possibly the most consumer hostile company I have ever had the displeasure of working with... worse by far than Comcast. Also interestingly, internet options were Comcast or I think Quest fiber. Sucks to be whoever bought my house, I guess.

<comment><USER6> There are like four different trash services we can pick from. It's kind of crazy to me. I guess when all you need is a truck, it's not a hard business to get into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was pleased when we lived in Boston where our building and many others was able to put microwave-based services on the roof. It was internet-only but very fast and inexpensive - just what we needed. Now we are in Louisville and back to the only two mediocre and more expensive choices - ATT and Spectrum. And if you go out into the country many homes are stuck with satellite internet service from Hughes which is damn near unusable.

<comment><USER8> Online games on HughesNet are unplayable. Called and complained that ~500ms RTT is unacceptable but they made up some excuse as to why it couldn't be faster, some mumbo jumbo about the speed of light

<comment><USER9> They didn't make that up.. the satellites are literally no closer then 118ms (one-way). If you and the source/destination are directly under the satellite you may be able to get a packet + response in 480ms under most-ideal conditions. (that is four legs of transit between ground & space)

Elevation of orbit is 35,768,000 meters [1], and light moves at ~300,000,000 meters per second.

[1] [https://www.hughes.com/resources/press-releases/echostar- xix...](https://www.hughes.com/resources/press-releases/echostar-xix- satellite-jupiter-high-throughput-technology-successfully)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is what frustrated me the most with some of my friends "free market" arguments when net neutrality was in the news. I am also a believer in the invisible hand, but it doesn't work when I can literally only choose from one provider.

<comment><USER11> it's not the invisible hand's fault when that hand is tied behind it's back. there's so many politicians that have been creating legislation that prevents new entrants from coming into the market with regulatory capture. that's not a free market.

<comment><USER12> The fact it's impossible for everyone to build cable everywhere means it isn't a free market.

<comment><USER13> The cost of the labor to build and maintain said cable makes it economically infeasible for a second ISP to build out service in many areas of the US. Permissive regulation will only enable competition in urban cores, as being a 3rd or 4th provider in suburban areas is not profitable.

Some areas have so few possible customers per mile that a fiber build by the incumbent provider would not break even for decades even with an 80% take rate by every building passed.

<comment><USER12> Just so we're no longer talking around the issue:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly)

> A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high > infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of > the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first > supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. > This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, > creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the > market; examples include public utilities such as water services and > electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were recognized as potential sources of > market failure as early as the 19th century; John Stuart Mill advocated > government regulation to make them serve the public good.

... and suffice it to say, I agree wit John Stuart Mill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's really depressing in rural places. I had to teach online all summer with DSL 6mbps down/ 0.3mbps up. Forget uploading any video. My students never saw my face. Thankfully, the videoconferencing software I was using managed to allow me to share my PowerPoint and voice reliably enough. Otherwise, I don't know what I would have done.

</comment><comment><USER15> Regulation does't always spur open competition and often has unintended consequences.

Separate the last mile pipe provider/operator (infrastructure) from the service providers. All service providers compete across that pipe. Traditional ISPs, niche providers, etc. I may choose 5 of them as a consumer.

It does necessitate an open, multi-tenant architecture. Let's invest there rather than investing in trying to implement a new regulatory scheme.

<comment><USER16> Local loop unbundling, as it's called in the U.K. has definitely driven prices down for DSL, but it means there's very little in terms of actual consumer choice. It's basically one ISP (virgin excluded cause that's docsis and a totally different network) for everyone, with different people you can buy service from. If anything actually goes wrong with the network, open reach fixes it, but there's no way for a company to differentiate on performance, only price.

<comment><USER17> > there's no way for a company to differentiate on performance, only price.

That may be true for DSL, but for new infrastructure, you could have local fiber to the nearest meet-me room, and it's then your ISP's responsibility to light up that fiber. Fiber is capable enough that the limits on performance and service will absolutely be the ISP and the equipment you hook up.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, you might, but generally I've seen most deployments of FTTH being GPON, which would mean you have to light up a small neighbourhood as the smallest unit, unless you do something funky like WDM...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Heck, many Americans in metro areas have only one choice for internet providers. I've helped people here in SoCal whose only choice has been 5-10MB DSL service, and they were getting charged like $70/month for it.

<comment><USER19> Helped how? Getting charged that for 100mb in LA, and feel it is too high.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, done tech support for them, only to find out how slow their internet was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In a rural area where the local telco was granted a legal monopoly, their "high speed" comes in a 5/0.5mbps on a good day. The area is now blanketed in T-Mobile 5G coverage, but questions asking T-Mobile about a 5G hotspot with a wired LAN port have gone unanswered. I'd love to use a 5G hotspot as the house's modem, but WiFi-only just won't work. Do any 5G devices with a SIM slot and a wired LAN port exist?

<comment><USER21> Cradlepoint makes very good enterprise-grade cellular modems with wired Ethernet support. They're expensive and I'm not sure if individuals in the US can buy them without going through a grey market vendor. For some reason or other, the cellular industry doesn't like it when devices are readily available to end users.

It's also possible to use some home routers 'in reverse,' to bridge a wifi signal to wired ethernet. Devices on the wired segment will be stuck in a double-NAT situation, however.

<comment><USER22> Doesn't have to be double NAT. You can do passthrough/IP routing with private IPs after the first device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> in NYC, I've only ever had the option for one cable provider at any given location, either Spectrum / Time Warner or Optimum, maybe RCN. but never more than one to pick from, unless you're in a fios building then I think that's an option. and there's usually DSL but that's not a real competitor.

<comment><USER24> We don't have FiOS or even have RCN on our block in NYC. Spectrum or "up to 3 to 7Mbps" Verizon DSL. That's it.

<comment><USER23> same

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a choice:

$80/mo for Local ISP DSL - 10 Mbps down, <1 up

OR

$100/mo for LTE hot spot for $100+/mo. 25 MBps down, 5Mbps up with data caps and throttling.

The local ISP says they're installing fiber but they're only installing it where the federal government subsidizes or completely funds it.

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems fairly unsurprising to me.

Internet is a utility. Most people also don't have a choice in who they get electric, water, gas, etc. from.

It's unfortunate that internet service quality is so varied from location to location, but utilities tend to form natural monopolies.

<comment><USER26> > Internet is a utility. Most people also don't have a choice in who they get > electric, water, gas, etc. from.

Wait, you don't get to choose who your electricity and gas provider is either ?

Here we get to choose from literally dozens of providers. Same goes for internet. I can choose from 13 different ISPs at my address on fiber alone.

I thought the US believed in competition and free markets ?

<comment><USER6> > Here we get to choose from literally dozens of providers

How does this work? Is it similar to all the various wireless providers that are actually just resellers for the people who own the actual infrastructure? I don't understand how you could choose to get electric or natural gas from someone else when there is a physical line that comes to your residence.

<comment><USER26> There is a physical infrastructure, owned by company A. You pay a fixed fee for access as part of your energy bill. You have no choice in that. Your actual subscription is with energy company B, Who you can choose freely. Of course company B doesn't hook up directly to your home, instead they look at the total amount of power used by customers of company B and they are obligated to supply that amount of power to the national grid.

<comment><USER6> Seems like an odd model. I guess it makes sense though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Living in NYC, I have one high-speed internet option (Spectrum, formerly Time Warner) and one not high-speed internet option (Verizon DSL with "up to" 3.1 - 7 Mbps). That's it.

<comment><USER27> NYC still has DSL option ? Wow. I left NYC in 2005 as a resident and would assume that it has fiber everywhere by now.

<comment><USER24> It was supposed to. NYC gave Verizon a deal in exchange for wiring fiber citywide. They never did.

<comment><USER28> They at least partially did. I'm in a not-wealthy area of the Bronx and somehow managed to get gigabit Fios from Verizon. But, yeah, it's certainly not everywhere yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Questions for the people from areas that _do_ have: do the different providers have separate infrastructures and facilities (optical fiber cables, switches, etc.)?

<comment><USER30> My parents' current and previous homes both had two choices. One was AT&T's fiber option (probably FTTN, not FTTH) and the other was cable through the local provider.

<comment><USER31> AT&T Fiber is FTTH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Soon they'll at least have 2...

[https://www.starlink.com/](https://www.starlink.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I may be in the minority but my Internet has only gotten better, faster, and cheaper over the years, so I am hesitant to advocate for any major change.

But it should be noted that the municipalities are typically who are granting a local monopoly over the existing lines to the ISP and preventing someone else from coming in and laying their own new cables down.

<comment><USER34> You're not. These studies draw an arbitrary line for what counts as broadband. And they typically ignore wireless and satellite options. Most people will have a cable, a DSL, and several wireless options.

The profit margin of the large cable companies reflect that. They're pretty much middle of the pack for the S&P 500. It's a capital intensive and relatively low margin business.

Look at Google Fiber. They had cities falling over themselves to get it and huge consumer demand. Ultimately they abandoned it because it doesn't make enough money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Only Cox at the most southern point of SoCal where I live. I have only one choice, other than satellite.

We can get 940Mbps down/35Mbps up w/ 1.25TB cap and mid level cable TV from Cox for.. wait for it $270/month. O_o

Currently I get 150Mbps down/5Mbps up + mid level cable TV... $130/month. It's fast enough for work, but feels so expensive.

<comment><USER36> do you have neighbors within ~100 ft? if so, why not share internet (and cost) with them? with that much bandwidth, you can split it 10 ways and not even notice.

an smb-class wireless router will let you segment neighbors into their own isolated vlan, and with mesh/repeaters, you can cover a fairly large area.

<comment><USER35> It's a good idea for higher density.

I could probably reach two of my neighbors (two shared walls), but not more without better equipment. Actually, because of how our construction is, I could probably do a 3-way mesh router setup and put one node in each place.

I had an acquaintance who wanted to start a company flashing a custom OpenWRT image onto Linksys routers, he added a little captive portal with billing through Stripe so he could collect the neighbor's portion.

Your comment reminded me to go check and see if he ever decided to go through with it.

I recall looking into this a long time ago, certainly could do it, but recall some terms and conditions that prohibited it maybe.

The other thing is even with all that bandwidth, there is the 1.25TB monthly bandwidth cap, which is one way I think they limit scenarios like this.

Good idea though thanks for suggesting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200814203602/https://ilsr.org/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200814203602/https://ilsr.org/report- most-americans-have-no-real-choice-in-internet-providers/)

</comment><comment><USER38> I live in an apartment in Passaic County, NJ. My ISP, Optimum, has a monopoly on this group of apartments.

They take advantage of this to charge $75/month for plain broadband Internet service, which is about 50% more than the average Internet service (including Verizon FIOS) costs in the nearby area.

Just sayin'.

</comment><comment><USER39> Thank you for sharing. This is exactly why Ready (YC S20) makes tools that help America's thousands of Local Internet Service Providers compete with the copper cartel. [https://ready.net](https://ready.net)

<comment><USER40> FYI your layout is somewhat broken on Firefox Android.

<comment><USER39> thank you Cameron. Just pushed update to site last week. Appreciate the feedback. Working on it now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have 4, which is unusual. To some the problem, more local competition is needed. The problem is curbing the anti-competitive prentices that prop up local monopolies. States don't seem to care about consumer choice.

</comment><comment><USER42> Time and time again lately this issue comes up on HN as if it's a single sector affected by the same umbrella of broken politics and broken system we have.

It isn't. It's the same old, rinse and repeated. America's evolution of the free market capitalism experiment has failed and became a plutocracy. That doesn't mean free market as a whole doesn't work but it means our version of its evolution has failed for a bunch of different reasons some more illogical and childish than others.

The question is the same always too. How and when do we recognize it and start rebuilding it in a radically new way. Does it take a civil war? A world one? Does it take 99% poverty? Or does it just take for China to fail so we can't have our mind numbing $5 electronics to keep us entertained.

How do we all (myself included) become citizens of a nation again and not consumers in a luxury work camp who are kept pacified?

</comment><comment><USER43> A side remark: They also don't seem to have any real choice in Presidential candidates (like a lot of governments around the world).

</comment><comment><USER8> Well hopefully things like Starlink can provide an alternative to terrestrial internet and force competition into the picture.

<comment><USER40> Frankly the problem is one of regulation and regulatory capture, not technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What I don't understand is why do we keep repeating these same observations again and again and still nothing happens. I've been upset at Comcast constantly jacking up the prices, not having an internet only option in my area (gets bundled up with TV), making sure good prices are available only if you get a 12 month contract and so much more. I mean Southpark said it years ago and even John Oliver had a segment on it. What is new about this? And why haven't we seen an action against it?

<comment><USER21> There's been no action on improving Internet service for the median American because American governance is responsive to the whims of business interests (in this case, ISPs with monopolies) and indifferent to the interests of the public. This pattern is reflected across the entire spectrum of public policy and is not just limited to the market for Internet services.

Put bluntly, American democracy is nowhere near as effective at protecting the interests of the American public as the American public has been made to believe. [0]

Internet access is merely a symptom of a deeper American problem and cannot be fixed without fixing the deeper problems with American governance.

[0] [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge- core/c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge- core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites_interest_groups_and_average_citizens.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Same thing with health insurance.

<comment><USER46> Interesting that we discuss sometimes benefits of having engineering licensed, but here we apparently see disadvantages of licensing going wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> right - and comparing its service to the AT&T offering, a residential Internet service provider in the California Bay Area said, "and, we don't send in those reports that most ISPs do" .. on a support call..

</comment><comment><USER48> Canadian here. For us it is Rogers, Bell or some skin of those two

<comment><USER49> For internet?

Where are you located? Even my grandparents in Northern Ontario have some 5 or so options, and not just skins of the Big 3.

I checked 8 providers when I lived in Kingston.

For cell phone, you are right.

<comment><USER50> If you're talking about Start, Tekksavy, Tbaytel and similar, they're all bound to Rogers or Bell. I think the user you're replying to is pretty much right when it comes to Canada, and it shows in the prices you get. Same thing for phones.

A couple providers are through satellite and such in rural areas and in those cases it's typically even worse since the service truly sucks while costing much, and they're in no rush to do anything about it when there are issues on the line. And I'm not even talking about middle-of-nowhere stuff, just places north of Sudbury for example.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing SproutCore 2.0 Developer Preview - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sproutcore.com/announcing-sproutcore-2-0/

<comment><USER2> Many congrats on the preview release.

In my opinion, this is a brave move from the team -- acknowledging that the SproutCore approach from the past four years needs to be ditched in favor of a brand-new codebase, and one that's a small fraction of the size (both code and API-wise) of the previous SproutCore.

Even though it's not recommended right now, I imagine that in due time SC 2.0 will also be recommended for "desktop-style" web applications, and when that happens, it'll be a force to be reckoned with.

<comment><USER3> It strikes me as less than brave, especially when you consider that 1.0 and 1.5 were also essentially backwards incompatible rewrites.

This update seems to move SproutCore away from what made it unique and towards something that mostly resembles what everyone else writing web frameworks is doing.

<comment><USER2> Totally -- but it takes balls to acknowledge that. I'd certainly feel betrayed if I had been a loyal SproutCore user: templates for the user interface is almost a complete 180° from the prior gospel.

But from an outside perspective, I think this could make SC truly competitive, and that's going to be a good thing for JavaScript-heavy web apps in general.

<comment><USER3> I'm not actually sure if the idea of templates alone is that much of a departure, I could see something template like working in Cappuccino (a more human readable version of a XIB perhaps), but relying on HTML and CSS is something I'm obviously not crazy about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that they're reducing the emphasis on native look and feel. The thing that's put me off all the native-mimicking JS libs like EXT and Sproutcore is that making web apps imitate native desktop apps seems like the wrong move in many cases. The web gives us a chance to rethink a lot of those old assumptions and newer, cleaner interfaces like Github etc. suggest that some of those old assumptions can be abandoned.

<comment><USER5> I agree that html freedom has done a lot to user interfaces and ux. But that works best in a web setting.

In an intranet setting (the kinda place where IE6 may still linger for 2-3 years) using standardized RIA frameworks like ExtJS help speedup the development cycle by offloading 80% of the design work from the 1000+ developers, which probably already have a handful trying to figure out in which order a certain financial transaction needs to be called on the Mainframe CICS-DB2.

<comment><USER4> I spent the last ten years writing intranet apps and evaluated and rejected EXT and similar frameworks several times because it just didn't meet our internal users' needs. They preferred our lightweight interfaces that rendered quickly and well on all kinds of different devices.

However, our environment was a little unusual in that we were able to mandate reasonably modern browsers (FF 3+, Webkit).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note: they're _announcing_ 2.0, not releasing anything ready for prime time.

The announcement indicates that they're releasing SproutCore 2.0 _Developer Preview_ with the caveat: "SproutCore 2.0 is still under heavy development and APIs are likely to change."

<comment><AUTHOR> I updated the title of the post to more accurately reflect that this is a Developer Preview release. Apologies for any confusion on our part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks more lightweight now, but still it's 12k LOC vs 1k LOC in Backbone. Need to look through, what do those 11k offer :)

Pure JS and drop-in integration is good too, we are a Java shop and lots of developers working on Windows, so introducing a Ruby-dependent JS framework would be hard in my case.

Previously we also considered SC as a 'heavy' JS solution - like Cappuccino, ExtJS or GWT(we used GWT for complex backends - it allowed us to share UI&server code), but now we'll have another look at it as an alternative to Backbone for frontends/mobile.

<comment><USER8> I'm helping a colleague of mine get into a RIA start-up and the original development he used ASP MVC on Windows. Do you know if any of the RIA JS frameworks play nicely with ASP MVC?

<comment><USER9> How about Knockout? So it's not a 'full' RIA JS framework, but in my mind, that's no bad thing: <http://knockoutjs.com/>

It feels like a nice fit to MVC/MS stuff (there's certainly plenty of examples of this, and Steve Sanderson now works for MS). And it's easy to bind whatever UI you want to your view models.

Personally I now use KO for even the smallest of JS/HTML 'apps'. It's lovely :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's an annotated Todo app source code just like Backbone.js (awesome!) ... however no link to the actual app hosted somewhere so I can play with it and experience the interaction.

<comment><USER11> Check it out at <http://todos20.strobeapp.com/>

<comment><USER10> thanks!! Anyone else have any useful links? I am looking forward to doing my first hello Sproutcore app and would love to know about the best blog posts, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me one of the more compelling things about Sproutcore in comparison to other Javascript MVC/binding frameworks (Backbone.js, Knockout, Angular.js, JavascriptMVC, etc) was that it seemed to offer a beautiful UI toolkit that was modern-looking and tailored to web apps.

Is part of the plan to shift focus away from that UI aspect?

If not, is there a tutorial on how to put together a simple app that uses some of the available UI components?

Thanks guys, keep up the great work.

<comment><USER13> I think that was exactly the problem with SproutCore -- it was essentially inseparable from it's UI toolkit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference between SC 2 and Backbone.js. Can anyone point out when someone would go for SC 2 instead of Backone.js.

<comment><USER15> I've been evaluating Backbone, Spine, JavascriptMVC, Knockout.js, and Sproutcore 2. What I like most about SC2 is the direct support for key-value coding, including bindings and reusable well-defined controllers.

I also find the 5-layer [Model, Model-Controller, Controller, View-Controller, View] better for my OO coding style and isolation of dependencies — but that's probably more of a personal quirk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would this be suitable for a mobile app? The existing view builder in sproutcore made that a no-go. But with HTML views it might have potential.

<comment><USER17> If you look at most mobile-optimized web applications today, they tend to be very "web-style," which SproutCore 2.0 is great for.

In the next few months, we will be working on a mobile control set that allows you to create more "native-style" interactions. I think both have their place and can deliver awesome experiences to users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great move guys! I've been working with SproutCore for a couple of years now, and reducing the framework overhead and ditching the ruby tool chain is a great step in the right direction. sproutcore.com is looking shinier than ever, and the NPR web app is awesome. I'm not even sure how you got streaming audio in a web page on the iPad.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you document your life and preserve memories in the internet age? - <AUTHOR> Prior to advancements in digital technology, documenting your life involved developing photos, scrapbooking, holding onto keepsakes/souvenirs from specific times/events, or just abstaining entirely to focus more on the experience itself. Nowadays, though, the tools used to do this have shifted more towards social media platforms.
With recent controversies around the power held by tech companies, I've been thinking more about this shift. By posting pictures and by making posts about my experiences to preserve them and share them with my friends, I feel like I'm giving up ownership of those memories to whoever is hosting that platform, be it Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc.
I'm not sure whether that's a big enough deal to decide to stop posting entirely. I'm also not sure of any alternatives that may exist. Every time I get an urge to share something fun or exciting that has happened in my life, I second guess myself, because I haven't figured out where I stand on the privacy vs. convenience discussion.
What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> Man, I am on weeks thinking on the same problem you wrote here.

I am tired of uploading my content on sites like Facebook, or Google. Short story: once I uploaded a personal video on Youtube, and they removed forever because there was a ACDC music on the environment. It was precious, and I lost it forever (forgot to do backup).

I am thinking on buying a domain to me, and create a blog to share albums just with people I want, create a newsletter for some topics, and keep my memories and all my data on my servers (and my backups, online and offline).

Social networks would be used just to promote some link or content I want to share.

I sow some interesting things on [https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/)

<comment><USER3> YouTube deleted my entire channel because _one_ video had music in the background. No reinstatement, it's just gone. Then they deleted _another_ of my channels, and that whole Google account, and gave no reason - and I can't think of any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Poorly. I used to use Flickr, then I tried to curate my own subjects and periodically print out books. But in the end I just take pictures, video, and audio, and dump it in my computer hoping one day my future self will sort it out.

I wish it were dealt with more auto-magically (and interchangeably) on the Os level.

But in the end I don't really care too much. Life is for living and communing with loved ones, not documenting. Still, I post frequently, careless of who "owns" it. I kinda fail to see how it can have value, all those pictures, even in aggregate. It just seems like noise.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't. I never really take pictures and find it annoying when others decide that they need a picture during any (extremely slightly) noteworthy moment. Of course, some evens should be captured but thankfully everyone in the world thinks they should take a picture during those times so there really is no reason for me to.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use an offline WordPress server to blog about my thoughts and experiences. Offline meaning the server is only available on my home network.

I have often thought I would like a tool that would convert my WordPress content into a book. The book would be for my wife and children when I move on.

There is definitely a freedom in blogging for yourself and your immediate family. I just need to resolve the issue of a less technical format of my musings for my family.

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember what my friend's sister shared with me a few months ago. She put all her adventure and travel into a blog so that the time when she becomes a grandma, she could just share the blog with her grandchildren to tell them her life stories.

This is what I think also about documenting my life.

</comment><comment><USER8> Strangely enough a friend of mine uses scrapbooking. It is very old school and manual but she gets a lot of enjoyment out of it. It is something she wants to leave her children when she is gone.

</comment><comment><USER9> Once you stop caring what people think about you, the only thing you need is an iCloud backup subscription.</comment>


/r/videos received DMCA requests, not April Fools; Reddit admin says otherwise - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/30xhlp/dmca_mass_takedown_request_the_state_of_play_on/cpwrufk

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for editorialized title, but this is a good example on how not to do an April Fools joke.</comment>


What books are on your "must read" list for web startups? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-books-are-on-your-must-read-list-for-web-startups

<comment><AUTHOR> Any specific recommendations from HN members?</comment>


Dogs able to sniff 750 people per hour could help identify Covid-19 cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/sniffer-dogs-answer-to-the-covid-19-testing-crisis-mirror-2020-4 <comment><USER2> Misleading heading. As the article says it's not yet known if dogs can sniff out Covid-19. (Of course once that's established they could help.)</comment>


Why Dynamic Typing Is A Bad Idea - <AUTHOR> https://stacktrace.so/2014/02/why-duck-typing-is-a-bad-idea/

<comment><USER2> This article doesn't really bring anything new to the table; it's yet another rehash of "some errors can be caught at compile time and dynamically typed languages do not do this so they are bad".

The article claims that dynamic typing can lead to hard-to-track bugs. That is certainly true, but only paints half a picture: for example, in dynamically & strongly typed languages such as Python, Clojure or Erlang, you'd get errors instead of the wonky type-changing behavior of a weakly typed cousin such as Javascript. Secondly, just because dynamically typed languages do not catch certain classes of bugs at compile time doesn't really say much unless you leave out testing, which can catch way more bugs, including ones that the compile-time type checker won't.

The final paragraph says a lot:

        Duck typing is nice for rapid prototyping but you
        may not want to use it in any production code. It's
        terrible to debug, hard to test and sometimes leads
        to bugs occurring extremely rare.

The article does not make the testing argument and only makes the _sometimes_ -hard-to-debug argument.

Dynamically typed languages can be used to produce reliable systems just fine; consider Erlang.

<comment><USER3> > unless you leave out testing, which can catch way more bugs, including ones > that the compile-time type checker won't.

1\. which sadly tends to be the usual state of the industry, as distasteful as it is. Static typing bringing some sort of "mandatory testing" is thus something of an argument.

2\. good static type systems also make testing easier, see e.g. specification testing (quickcheck) in Haskell versus Erlang. I think Haskell's is much more enjoyable.

3\. Dependent typing.

> The article does not make the testing argument and only makes the sometimes- > hard-to-debug argument.

Which is not really correct anyway, most people who've had to debug C++ templates soup don't argue that it's easier to debug than Python code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Eh.... no

While the kind of bugs that are stated on the post are possible, in practice they are not seen (or at least, not commonly) and not that difficult to catch and correct. On the other hand, they remove the need for constant checking that a variable is of the correct type (which is handy, for example for refactoring code)

I know that dynamic languages are a little scary at the beginning (because that was what happened to me when I was learning Python, coming from a C/C++ background), but the truth is that kind of "protection" is not that necessary

Also, there are LOTS of production systems using dynamic languages that are working just fine...

</comment><comment><USER5> Duck typing is not the same thing as dynamic typing. You can do the latter without the former, and there are features akin to duck typing in some languages normally thought of as statically typed (e.g., C++ templates).

</comment><comment><USER6> My favorite:

 _Static analysis has not proven to be especially helpful in finding bugs in SQLite. Static analysis has found a few bugs in SQLite, but those are the exceptions. More bugs have been introduced into SQLite while trying to get it to compile without warnings than have been found by static analysis._

[https://sqlite.org/testing.html](https://sqlite.org/testing.html)

<comment><USER7> But aren't compiler warnings also a form of static analysis?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And this is precisely why there are no large, successful systems implemented in dynamic languages, whereas all statically typed language projects have no bugs whatsoever.

<comment><USER9> Google was originally written in Python. The reason it was changed wasn't directly due to Python being a dynamic language, but that the new programmer was more familiar with C++ and that C++ would run faster.

<comment><USER10> The person you were replying to was being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "hard to debug" claim is repeated ad nauseam, but never supported by real- life examples. Typically it comes with some academic example that is not actually hard to debug, plus some vague promise that in the "real world" nasty stuff can happen. This article is not the exception.

</comment><comment><USER12> Translation: When you name your method "output" and write no documentation, you don't have a good idea of what's going to come out the other end.

</comment><comment><USER13> Shouldn't anybody browsing HN understand the difference between dynamic and static typing? Who is even upvoting this?

<comment><USER14> Strong typing zealots?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First, article confuses duck typing with dynamic typing. Second, it mentions variable declaration semantics which has nothing to do with dynamic or duck typing. Then promptly gives an example of operator overloading for an unnamed language with unspecified semantics to prove his point. It doesn't say anything about dynamic typing or why it is bad.

Keep up the good work, you'll be the next SV darling in no time.

</comment><comment><USER16> To the writer of this article: Just go find another career; plain and square, you suck.</comment>