You can include a transaction bounty (traditionally 0.01 BTC) with your payment which the verifiers receive if they're the first to verify your payment. Effectively, this puts your transaction at the top of the priority queue. When you're connected to a healthy number of peers, this can bring down the verification time down to seconds.
Isn't transaction verification tied to block generation, and isn't block generation limited to about 1 every 10 minutes?
The generating of new blocks is what sets the transaction "in stone". And the more blocks past a transaction's inclusion, the harder it is to reverse that transaction - more blocks = more certain you have actually received the money.
Prior to being included in a block, it's entirely possible for the payer to issue the same money to multiple recipients. Once it's in, it's assured that only one is included, and others are therefore invalid. So it's in recipients' best interests to wait for a few blocks before totally accepting something as "paid".
It is. Transaction fees are (theoretically) supposed to provide incentive to be a block solver, and the solver can choose what transactions to include and what to ignore, so it's in their best interest to include ones that have fees. As usage increases, this means more and more work for the solvers, so they're more likely to drop things they can't make money on.
In fact, if the statistics are accurate, my country has a higher murder rate (5 per 100K) than the "libertarian paradise" of Somalia (3.2 per 100K) (2) who have no central government (3).
There have been over 4,200 civilians killed in the fighting in Mogadishu in just the last 2 years (1). Even if that were the extent of violent crime in Somalia it would amount to an annual rate of ~23 per 100k. By all accounts, however, violent crime remains extraordinarily high throughout the entire country, we just can't put numbers to it because there are no authorities to report to. Here's some more context: over 1.5 million Somalis have been internally displaced by the violence, and over 600,000 have fled to other countries (2).
That number on Wikipedia is so low because it came from a 2004 WHO report which was compiled using data from national authorities - the vast majority of violent crime in Somalia never gets reported to any authority.
That link is wrong. Python does ship with a robotparser module in the standard library that parses robots.txt files, but urllib2 does not use it out of the box. This can be easily confirmed using Wireshark or a quick glance at the source: http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/08b5e2c9112c/Lib/urllib2.p....
Maybe I'm missing something because I'm not tuned into the Rails community, but what is going on here? Someone submitted a favicon to an open source project, and now it's on Hacker News?
First, the contributor didn't observe, but actually contributed something useful. In turn, that made the developer really excited about it. And finally this is a fun contribution. Open source win.
As someone who's never heard of Qbix I came away from this post with the knowledge that you make "tools to accomplish things with" that represent "a leap in social communication." Oh, and that you're out to change the world. Before clicking around the site I actually thought it was a parody.
Well, this is our first post on the blog. It may be a little bit grandiose. But to tell you the truth, what's written there is exactly right on. We have a technology, a capable team, we are funded, we are on a roll, and our products are doing very well on the iPhone and Mac right now (top 25 on the Mac App Store).
It will all make a lot more sense once I start writing more blog entries. I am pretty excited, and that blog is like anything else we do ... it will come together part by part, and it will all make sense.
I have a question though ... do you think the header doesn't work with the white background? We designed the rest of our site to be pleasant to look at for long periods of time, and in my experience, white isn't. I'm curious what you think
If I copy GPL-licensed code into my BSD-licensed library, none of my code has to be relicensed.
Yes it does, that's a pretty central feature of the GPL. See section 2.b. of the GPL (v2):
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
In other words, my code remains mine. I still control the copyright to it, and do not have to relicense it.
Those conditions don't apply because Google is accused of distributing a derived work. If Google is distributing a work derived from GPL'd code then they can only distribute that work under the terms of the GPL. There's a lot of debate over whether what Google's distributing can actually be considered a derived work, but that's a separate question entirely.
