JonSkeptic

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

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

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

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

My favorite part of the article:

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

also:

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

That's remarkably cheap.

>Mt. Gox login is back

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

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

One is a currency, the other is a commodity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hay-o!

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

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

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

But Dogecoin is doing well.

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

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

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

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

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

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