I had a day off this weekend from shooting Supernatural, and I was walking around downtown Vancouver on Saturday, sampling all the artisan coffee I could get my throat around. At one point I saw a pair of guys walking towards me wearing gamer shirts. Black short-sleeved, one Halo and one Call of...
I made an inappropriate mashup of breaking news headlines. Again.
Hong Kong police use pepper spray to remove students from Ohio Wal-Mart
RAW VIDEO: Navy jets prepare for 31 days for raping student
Mexican army detains Kim and Kanye
Federal government, Navajo officials sign off on $554M settlement over June killing of 22 gang suspects
Chicago's O’Hare International and Midway airports have canceled more than 1,950 flights due to mistrust over police shooting of Michael Brown
Iran and six world powers make little progress in violating its own norms with child sexual abuse report
Suspect in University of Virginia student's disappearance has been transported back in time
Apple promises fix for prostitutes
US stocks rebound sharply: "Jersey Shore" star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi delivers baby girl
Moderate Muslims worldwide rally against 'haunted' hotel
Attorney General Eric Holder said the al Qaeda-affiliated Khorasan Group to pay for 5-year-old cancer patient #AshyaKing to have proton beam therapy in Prague
Derek Jeter stabbed another worker at Oklahoma food processing plant before being shot
More than 700 U.S. flights canceled in Chicago after President Obama speaks at the Global Health Security Agenda Summit
Thousands of experimental Ebola vaccines available in coming months, snarls air traffic
FAA lets Hollywood's drones fatally stab 4 children while they were walking to school
RT @AP_Politics: Michelle Obama once declared dead only to resurface as suspect in a kidnapping, killing is sentenced to death
If I went out more, there's not a chance I would ever have met the people I now consider good friends. Yet they are all out there, somewhere. I had to stay where I am to find them where they are. Now that it's done, what comes after?
Now, the game was still in its security case. When I got to the front, I showed my receipt for the case to be removed. The young man studied my receipt like it was the most important document he had ever seen. My skin started prickling because I knew something really frustrating was about to happen. I just knew. Anyone who has been racially profiled knows that feeling.
I had about four nightmares out of five dreams overnight. One involved one of my nephews screaming and crying, although I don't remember why (thankfully), and another where the pinky finger on my right hand was cut open from tip to base. Another involved me feeling like I had woken up (I'm not entirely convinced that I hadn't) and I couldn't move. I was almost completely paralyzed and terrified because of that.
I was so bothered that I turned a light on and the TV to get back to sleep, something I haven't done in a really long time. Four nightmares in four hours is too much for me. What the hell?
I toss my cigarette on the ground and shove the gun deep into my pocket, then push through the doors and walk inside. The place was empty, a real honest to god shit hole this one. One guy standing around, he ain't got no life outside of this place, its got him by the balls. There's an old man behind the desk listening to the sound of his own heart as it ticks the seconds off his life.
I'm at the desk and tell him I want a room for the night. He doesn't look up. I'm nothing to him, I could be the hapless stiff standing next to me with all the world around and nothin to live for but hope and a prayer that life cant be this ugly, but it is.
His hand disappears inside a drawer and comes back with a rusted shank of a key you could die from if you looked at it too long. I run my hand across the worn out desktop dug out with knife gouges and smeared with old coffee stains until the key is in my hand and I'm shoving it into my pocket, right against that gun. I've got my hand wrapped around it now and I'm staring at the geezer with enough intent to burn his face off, but he won't look at me. What have I gotta do to get him to look at me?
I feel the sweat on the back of my neck now, and the dust from this crazy old place is starting to burn inside my lungs. I turn my body to the side and let the gun slide out of my hand. I walk towards the stairs and look back at the woman who was behind me.
What's her story? Everybody has a story.
I wrote this a few days before my birthday in 2007.
I'm not much of a drinker and that's an understatement, but sometimes I think if I could just drink enough, maybe I could be who I want to be, and say what I want to say. Break the chain that's been with me forever.
I can talk to strangers, I can deal with family and acquaintances, but it's very hard for me to deal with people above that point. Family is forgiving, at least for me, and I know I can't screw that up. But I'm terrified at times interacting with everyone else. The more I like someone the more difficult it becomes, and it's not hard for me to really like certain types of people that open themselves to the world.
I'm not trying to complain. Life is what it is. I just wish I knew how to fix myself. It's not impossible to deal with most of the time, but there are times when things happen and you're not in control anymore and then you're stuck.
Sometimes all you want to do is hear their voice, and you've lost your own.
Variety reported a little while ago that YouTube has agreed to purchase Twitch for $1 billion in cash. I've heard that Twitch pushes more bits than Hulu does these days which means their infrastructure isn't anything to laugh at, but they've had problems with peering the same way that Netflix has. With Netflix it's an extortion racket on the part of large ISPs, with Twitch it's more that they haven't been big enough for anyone to care about changing routing and adding ports to keep up with demand.
That shouldn't be a problem anymore, assuming Google intends to roll Twitch onto their infrastructure at some point. And even if they don't, YouTube's heft should solve the size problem easily enough. Whether they'll do that is one of several questions that I'm sure people are thinking about today.
Here are some of mine:
1. Will Google apply YouTube's copyright enforcement system to Twitch?
2. Will Google move Twitch onto its infrastructure?
3. As Variety mentioned, will the Department of Justice intervene and try to block the purchase?
4. Will Google replace the system that Twitch has in place for streamers to earn money with the video advert system it uses on YouTube?
5. Will Google bring Twitch's paid subscription channel idea to YouTube?
6. If moved onto YouTube's platform, will Twitch broadcasts be automatically be archived as they are on YouTube?
7. Will users need to have a Google account and login with it to access Twitch in the future?
8. Will Google integrate Analytics with Twitch?
9. Will Google simply poach talent from Twitch and leave the service itself to rot and die?
10. Will Twitch end up banned in countries that have banned YouTube?
11. What will happen to the Twitch mobile app?
I'm sure there are other questions, and these should generate some lengthy debate on their own. Twitch seems to have a deal where streamers can only broadcast the new Wolfenstein game on Twitch with the blessing of Twitch and Bethesda until May 20th. No such limitations exist on YouTube, making it a viable alternative for live streaming that specific game at the moment. That probably won' be the case anymore after this merger. In fact, you've really got to wonder if things like that won't get even worse.
On the positive side, Twitch doesn't allow multi-bitrate streaming except for channels above a certain threshold of viewers because of the strain it puts on their limited resources. YouTube allows it all on all streams both archived and live. That would be a big improvement in Twitch's service seeing as how so many American ISPs have bandwidth caps.
Twitter has banned porn, sex acts, sexual nudity, and other sexually suggestive things from Vine. Instagram is banning hash tags like #sex and inconsistently banning users for uploading nude photos, and I heard yesterday of an online adult model being suspended from Twitter itself for uploading and having tasteful and artistic nude photos.
Businesses are free to do whatever they like within the law, but that doesn't make censorship any less offensive and dangerous. Especially with the increasing merger of corporation and government. Governments could never dream of being able to censor people with the efficiency and scope that businesses get away with.
Why worry about Big Government moralists in Congress turning the Internet into a daycare center when businesses gleefully do it on their own just to make more money? (It's especially stupid when Twitter has lost money every year it has existed for reasons that have nothing to do with a naked body.)
If corporations really find the naked human body so distasteful, maybe they should dissolve and their owners find something else to do in life. Because right now they absolutely are failing at it.
How about we start calling these acts by a different name? Maybe if Apple's "Victorian" policies were called "Iranian", or maybe "Islamic Modesty Guidelines" -- which is what they are in practice, just a lighter shade of gray -- people wouldn't sit idly by while corporations kid-proof our entire fucking lives, and not even to protect children, just to make more money.
The last Bitcoin bubble ran from March 16th ($47) through April 10th ($259) on BitStamp with somewhat higher numbers on MtGox. BTC fell from $259 to $130 in a couple of hours during the first exchange run, then fell a second time from all the way down to $60.
That 451% increase in 25 days almost completely evaporated once the speculators and traders decided to cash out. The thing that probably stopped another bubble from forming before now was the ineptitude of the amateur exchanges which simply fell over when it actually mattered and scared away everyone with any amount of real money.
I've seen nothing that would lead me to believe that the same thing won't happen again.
First, as a service, the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is the sum of its benefits and drawbacks when compared to other digital currency services. I went over this earlier this year and anyone familiar with Bitcoin is probably aware of its many drawbacks and few benefits. Bitcoin is not nearly as anonymous as you think it is and never will be unless it becomes a viable currency, and right now that's not the case.
Until that happens, three major problems stand in the way of practical anonymity:
The nature of the way that Bitcoin functions means that every single transaction is broadcast publicly and recorded. Entire wallets could be moved from person to person covertly, but that's not practical.
Government surveillance capabilities have exploded in the last 20 years. If the United States and Israel can sneak mechanically-damaging malware into the networks and computers involved in Iran's nuclear programs, can break VPNs with ease and possibly end-run around SSL, deep monitoring of BTC transactions from the exchange all the way down to your PC are well within reason.
The need to exchange Bitcoins for real currency in order to do anything meaningful with them is its single weakest point. The two largest exchanges dealing in US dollars -- MtGox in Japan and Bitstamp in Europe -- are already taking steps to comply with US and international laws regarding money laundering that require proof of identity and residency that can be subpoenaed. Because exchanges sit outside the intention and design of the Bitcoin system, they are a natural point of attack for thieves and governments alike.
If what the NSA has done with Google and Facebook is any indication, along with existing surveillance of financial networks through Fincen, it's possible that every currency exchange taking place at any company -- including and especially China's new exchange -- is already being monitored and stored.
Other significant drawbacks besides a false sense of anonymity include the lack of transaction guarantees (delivery, time-to-delivery) and reversibility, no fraud protection, lack of fund security (lose your digital wallet, lose your funds), hidden fees from exchanges, uncertain future for fees which are guaranteed to increase but with no known boundary, a dearth of high quality client applications, no supporting commerce market, private and yet not authoritative protocol development not based on any vetted standard, unaddressed security weaknesses in the blockchain protocol, a lack of transaction metadata, and no plan to deal with inevitable contraction of the monetary base from wallet loss.
And that's just off the top of my head. Compared to a service like Paypal which is available in 193 countries including Cyprus and China, Bitcoin has too many flaws and far too few benefits.
* * *
What's causing the current bubble? It's hard to say. Claims that financial problems in Cyprus caused the first bubble were laughable from the outset. Cyprus instituted capital controls before the bubble began to form, meaning banks were closed and ATMs were limited to less than €100 (about $135 dollars).
Some overly confident startups had planned to deploy Bitcoin ATMs to Cyprus within weeks, but the banks reopened long before that was ever feasible and they probably would have been illegal anyway. The first Bitcoin ATM wasn't deployed until just the past week or so and it wasn't in Cyprus or any country where it would actually benefit people.
Speculation is still the best explanation for the April bubble and very little has changed since then. Volume growth on the Chinese exchange hasn't been nearly enough to account for the current bubble. If anything, it may be drawing in more investors and speculators looking to realize capital gains without paying any taxes.
The only cause of commodity bubbles is scarcity, and the three primary drivers of scarcity are increased demand, production shortfall, and of course speculation. There may be an increase in demand for BTC, but not so much as to explain a 187% increase in value in 18 days. There's only been an increase in production this year, so that's out. That only leaves speculation has the cause.
Things change quite a bit if you consider BTC a currency. Value can fluctuate based on subjective measurements like investment security. BTC is terrible for investment security because its value relative to other currencies is psychotic. Nobody is investing in BTC long-term because it has long-term prospects of rapid declines and is subject to manipulation like no other security can be.
Investors will complain endlessly about excessive regulation, but regulation is why financial markets can exist at all in modern times. Even a mildly successful attack on the blockchain could reduce confidence in Bitcoin's viability and cause its value to plummet, allowing the attacker to buy up BTC at very low prices which could result in significant gains even for a very small recovery. Denial of service attacks against the three largest exchanges could easily cause a market crash. And none of that carries any threat from law enforcement. Exchanges aren't banks, they are tiny and poorly run unregulated startups that could disappear off the face of the earth and nobody would care. The entire Bitcoin monetary base wouldn't even qualify as a tiny hedge fund, even at $7 billion in value.
That only leaves speculators. It can't be said with certainty precisely for the reasons that investors won't seriously touch Bitcoin, because of the lack of transparency. Bitcoin is good for freedom advocates trying to avoid third world repressive governments, but it won't hide you from the big players and it's useless for just about anything else. But there just aren't any other viable explanations for the April bubble and the one forming right now.
The only question I have is when will it pop. The last bubble (again using Bitstamp as a baseline) ranged from $47 to $259, a 451% increase. To match that this time, BTC would have to hit $800. This current bubble is just about to cross the 300% threshold, so it has a ways to go before it's even as big as the last one.
But that doesn't mean it'll pop at precisely the same point. It could crash at any moment or build to 1500%, there's no way to know without having more data. If the speculators aren't moving BTC between exchanges and are primarily buying and selling on a single exchange, which doesn't seem to be the case, it may never be possible to predict criticality. If funds are being regularly moved, it should be possible to tell how big the BTC reserves are and to identify the traders. Had that been done in April, it might be possible to estimate where the tipping point is based on where it was before.
That was never done, and isn't being done now, which again is a big reason that real investors won't touch Bitcoin.
An anti-evolution group is suing the Kansas State Board of Education for instituting a science curriculum that teaches evolution. The nonprofit Citizens for Objective Public Education filed a lawsuit Thursday to block the board, education commissioner and Department of Education from teaching science classes consistent with new educational benchmarks developed by 26 states to align school systems across the U.S.
Seems like MFC cam models say they'll be on, then don't get on, and they do it constantly. It's understandable when you remember that most of them are in their early 20s and are inherently immature and irresponsible people that still have a lot of growing up to do.
But they're screwing with a hybrid of fans-customers that pay their bills and enable that carefree lifestyle. Some day down the road, they aren't going to have the body of a 20-year-old anymore and their fans are going to go somewhere else when they get jerked around like that. As far as jobs go, it may be fun and absurd, but that's no excuse to act unprofessionally. The same rule applies to this as everything else in life. Don't say you're going to do something if you're not going to do it.
