What are colored coins?

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What exactly are colored coins? I’ve tried understanding, but I don’t quite get it yet . . . Do any examples exist?

via alternatives – What are colored coins? – Bitcoin Stack Exchange.

Colored coins are a method to track the origin of bitcoins, so that a certain set of coins can be set aside and conserved, allowing a party to acknowledge them in various ways. Such coins can be used to represent arbitrary digital tokens, such as stocks, bonds, smart property and so on.

The colored coins protocol is decentralized just like Bitcoin, but the current effort to develop an implementation is done under the BitcoinX project (tentative name), which also aims to provide some related services.

As this is still under development, you will not find any existing examples.

You can read more about it in Overview of colored coins (work in progress).

Lapse-Pi Touch – A Touchscreen Timelapse Controller

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Functionality

The User interface allows you to:

  • position the dolly on the rail via the motor control buttons
  • change the motor pulse duration between shots
  • change the delay between shots
  • change the number of shots
  • see what time is left for the current sequence
  •  start and stop the time-lapse

And it’s all done using a few simple screens with a simplistic, easy-to-use touchscreen user interface. The following video shows it all in action.

via Lapse-Pi Touch – A Touchscreen Timelapse Controller.

U.S.: Stop using Internet Explorer

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The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a part of Homeland Security known as US-CERT, said in an advisory released on Monday morning that the vulnerability in versions 6 to 11 of Internet Explorer could lead to “the complete compromise” of an affected system.

“We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem,” Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute warned in a separate advisory, that US-CERT linked to in its warning.

via U.S.: Stop using Internet Explorer – chicagotribune.com.

How the FCC Plans to Save the Internet By Destroying It

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Previous telecommunications systems — most notably the phone system — are regulated as “common carriers”. This means you can call whoever you like; you can use whatever phone you want; and anyone in a service area can sign up at a fair rate.

This designation recognizes that communication systems are too important to be left to the vagaries of profit-be-damned executives and that the operators are in very powerful positions to do harm and extract tolls.

via How the FCC Plans to Save the Internet By Destroying It: An Explainer — Medium.

Democratizing the Datastore

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No matter how you slice it, the database market is massive and evolving. It’s also a market that has received a disproportionate share of VC investment, with VCs plowing funding into a long list of database related market segments including: NoSQL, Hadoop, graph databases, open-source SQL, cloud-based databases, visualization, etc. But for all of that innovation, the process of setting up and running very large database remains either expensive or complicated. Expensive because large databases still often require expensive hardware and/or licenses. Complicated because setting up a massive cluster of commodity machines to run a database requires a ton of administrative work and expertise that not a lot of people have. It’s this administrative complexity that Crate is out to eliminate – and that’s the real story behind the investment: the democratization of database cluster management. Crate’s real claim to fame is that it allows developers – any developer – to easily set up a massively scalable data store on commodity hardware with sub-second query latency simply and within minutes.

via Democratizing the Datastore: Why we invested in Crate | Yankee Sabra Limey.

F.C.C., in ‘Net Neutrality’ Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane

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The new rules, according to the people briefed on them, will allow a company like Comcast or Verizon to negotiate separately with each content company—like Netflix, Amazon, Disney or Google—and charge different companies different amounts for priority service.

via F.C.C., in ‘Net Neutrality’ Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane.

The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos

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When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.

via The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos | Raw File | WIRED.

The resulting framelets had to be individually reassembled in Photoshop. After kluging through countless engineering problems (try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads), the LOIRP team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image. This proof of concept brought the first NASA funding in 2008, and the team recently completed processing the entire tape collection.

This Time, Get Global Trade Right

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But the administration’s rationale for secrecy seems to apply only to the public. Big corporations are playing an active role in shaping the American position because they are on industry advisory committees to the United States trade representative, Michael Froman. By contrast, public interest groups have seats on only a handful of committees that negotiators do not consult closely.

via This Time, Get Global Trade Right – NYTimes.com.

Drones On Demand

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Supposing you can make the whole thing safe, then it might stand a chance. The app could summon a drone using its GPS for location and the internet to communicate with the drone. This means the drone has to have a good internet connection and a satellite link seems like the best option, but the technology for this isn’t easy to get right.

via Drones On Demand.