Obama's Fmr. Chief Economic Advisor On Bitcoin's Usefulness: “Hahahaha. ROTFL”
Eighty-seven percent of the nation’s top economists think that the digital currency, Bitcoin, has “limited usefulness.” Given the growing popularity of the enigmatic currency, the University of Chicago conducted its famous Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) poll of 38 of the world’s top economists, to see how experts felt about its longterm future. By far the best response came from the former Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, who simply wrote, “Hahahaha. ROTFL.” Bitcoin is a digital currency designed by an anonymous programmer that is produced by “miners” who contribute expensive computing power to solving the mathematical puzzles necessary to bring more of the scarce currency into existence. Early speculators and anarchy-friendly buyers gave the crypto-currency an early boost, eventually earning it mainstream acceptance at popular websites, including the home of lonely netizens, OkCupid. Even after months of wild swings in ...
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Rights Groups Question Legality of Targeted Killing
In a letter sent to President Obama, the nation’s leading human rights organizations, also called for an end to the secrecy surrounding the use of drones.
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Mozilla Moves Ahead With Its Plans For A Common Web API For Payments
Mozilla is working with payment vendors and the W3C standards body to create a common API to make online payments, both on desktop and mobile, easier and more secure. To get this process going, Mozilla has implemented a new and experimental JavaScript API into its new Firefox OS for smartphones that will eventually allow web apps to accept payments. Mozilla argues that having a common API for handling payments that can be integrated with multiple payment vendors will open up new business models for developers and publishers. This new API, navigator.mozPay(), Mozilla says, was inspired by Google’s Wallet for Digital Goods API and will ship in Firefox OS first and then be added to Firefox for Android and desktop Firefox later. While it’s currently a very experimental API (and still incomplete), Mozilla expects that it will be usable enough to “process live payments on the first Firefox OS phones and evolve quickly from real-world usage.” The question to ask here, of course, is why ...
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Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine That Will Soon Power Chrome And Chrome OS
Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future. The “Collaboration Has Been Fantastic” As Google’s VP of Engineering Linus Upson and Alex Komoroske, Google Product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me yesterday, the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem. Komoroske noted that when it comes to working with the other companies involved ...
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Mozilla And Samsung Team Up To Develop Servo, Mozilla's Next-Gen Browser Engine For Multicore Processors
At first glance, this looks like an odd partnership: Mozilla just announced that it has recently begun collaborating with Samsung on Servo, its next generation browser engine. Mozilla Research started working on Servo as a research project in 2012. The new browser engine, which is still far away from being available in any commercial project, is written in Rust, a relatively new programming language that is also being developed by Mozilla Research. Together, Mozilla and Samsung are bringing both Rust and Servo to Android and the ARM architecture. Samsung, a company spokesperson said, is interested in this project because the company is “investigating various new technologies to innovate legacy products. This collaboration will bring an opportunity to open a new era of future web experience.” Browser Engines In The Age Of Multicore Computing As Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich told me yesterday, he believes that the future of computing will inevitably involve parallel computing (and he’s ...
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