Ah, in Canada it's 5 years. "Punishment can range from the person being imprisoned for a period of less than five years or until the person complies with the order or fine."
US law changed where nobody is outside their jurisdiction anymore with these new MSB laws, which is why a lot of foreign services stopped dealing with US residents. FL can petition whatever federal government agency to go after them like they did foreign Liberty Reserve exchangers.
Stop spreading FUD. The MSB rules only apply to exchanges incorporated or physically located in the US, including its outlying territories. They don't apply to foreign exchanges, i.e., MtGox or most other current major BTC exchanges.
Foreign services stopped dealing with US residents because last year new FBAR and FATCA compliance rules went into effect, requiring US taxpayers to provide more information about their foreign assets, and the US signed numerous new agreements with most major nations to share data about U.S. account-holders (agreements under which either nation could demand specified information about account-holders in the other nation as if they were domestic institutions) Many European banks stopped doing business with Americans because it was a paperwork nightmare to deal with the compliance.
1 CFR 1010.100(ff). An entity may now qualify as a money services business (MSB) under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) regulations based on its activities within the United States, even if none of its agents, agencies, branches or offices are physically located in the United States. Relevant factors include whether the foreign-located person, whether or not on a regular basis or as an organized or licensed business concern, is providing services to customers located in the United States.
The Final Rule requires each foreign-located MSB to appoint a person residing in the United States as an agent for service of legal process with respect to compliance with the BSA and its implementing regulations.
Translation: Bitstamp, if they take $1 from an American customer are now required to register with FinCen, possibly apply for licenses (nobody has figured this out yet at the bitcoin foundation) and have an agent based in the US to oversee legal compliance. I haven't heard of Bitstamp doing this. Use at your own risk.
US can change their laws all they want, they still can't shut down a bank in Slovenia because it has a British business account.
They can try and press the UK, but that, at best, will only result in Bitstamp moving its headquarters to a different country, which would result in a ton of taxes leaving too.
> US can change their laws all they want, they still can't shut down a bank in Slovenia
They can and do go after banks that have subsidiaries in the US. They also can pressure those banks that don't by going after their affiliates that do.
In engineering terms it would be easier to cover a shitty webcam with a bag, take a photo, and then use the lower bit of each pixel as the source of entropy.
You can use other things, like microphone input, or CPU temperature.
No need to buy expensive hardware generators.
Then you can use something like Fortuna to generate more random numbers from that seed:
> You can use other things, like microphone input,
There's now been reported a way to hack a computer by way of its microphone, so that particular method is out.
> or CPU temperature.
CPU temperature doesn't change enough to serve as a secure source of entropy.
> No need to buy expensive hardware generators.
In fact, there are plenty of projects meant to locate sources of entropy to provide more randomness for computer security purposes. The idea of a hardware source like a reverse-biased diode is just one example.
> Then you can use something like Fortuna ...
Interestingly, the Fortuna scheme relies on system sources of entropy other than its own resources to assure security.
> There's now been reported a way to hack a computer by way of its microphone, so that particular method is out.
No, it's not. It's in some server in a datacenter. If you can get to the server, you can just change the Poker code, no need to do any crazy microphone hacking. Plus you'd need to know exactly when and how the microphone was sampled.
> CPU temperature doesn't change enough to serve as a secure source of entropy.
Doesn't matter how much it changes, the lowest bits are random on a large enough time scale.
You can just run the sampler until you get enough bits, it will take a few minutes. Or you can run it constantly and add more and more entropy as you go.
Here's a quote: "Computers Can Be Hacked Using High-Frequency Sound --
A computer's microphone and speakers can covertly send and receive data"
Which word didn't you understand?
>> CPU temperature doesn't change enough to serve as a secure source of entropy.
> Doesn't matter how much it changes, the lowest bits are random on a large enough time scale.
False. Computer temperatures aren't a decent source of entropy, because they're too likely to remain stable for long periods. And the temperature can be predicted on a daily basis, a dangerous property for a secure source. That's why this source isn't used.
> Hello all. We just want to reiterate that this is not a “stop” but a temporary pause so that we can implement a proper fix to the problem. To analogize, not pausing withdrawals would be like trying to fix a car while going 120mph down the highway. The issue merely compounds on itself. This pause is clearly not ideal, but it will lead to a better outcome than doing otherwise. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.
It would be great if that were true but Mt.Gox has a habit of saying things like this as if they will have the situation resolved shortly and then never following up. Case and point after the seizure of their bank account in the US early last year they put out a press release saying they would update everyone on the situation on such and such a date. They never said anything about it ever again. Now we are here.
Hard to imagine how they can ignore this and survive as a business but their track record of follow though isn't great.
Photoshop is not mainly a painting application, though it can be used as one.
The strength of Photoshop is in its automation, ability to integrate with all kinds of things, ability to open a hundred different formats by default, plugins, 16-bit-per-channel support, color management, work with huge files, etc etc etc.
This looks like a competitor for ArtRage or Corel Paint.
http://krita.org/faq/item/16-krita-features contains some information on the features supported by Krita, including 16 bit per channel colorspaces (including Lab, a much-vaunted Photoshop feature). Krita is also available with support for OpenColorIO, and integration into the asset pipelines found e.g. in VFX studios is part of its mission statement (support for Photoshop's file formats has been steadily increasing along the way).
You're entirely correct about Krita's focus on painting (a focus it has greatly benefited from; see also my other comment), but it turns out the kinds of foundations required by a good painting application offer utility in many use cases.
> The strength of Photoshop is in its automation, ability to integrate with all kinds of things, ability to open a hundred different formats by default, plugins, ....
This, as far as I can see, sums up Gimp very well. With its open scripting and plugin system (Python) which not only allows anyone to write simple automation scripts, but allows people like me to find importers, exporters, filetype support, scripts and plugins for free, for about anyhting thinkable.
How does Photoshop compare to the Gimp in these areas? I am aware of the differences in usability, obviously. But purely on technical grounds: is the automatability and extensability of the Gimp comparable to that of Photoshop?
The problems with GIMP, the last time I checked, were - no support for 16 bit, problems with color management, slow (photoshop is extremely optimized, and now has GPU support). Plus I hate the default UI - they need to redo it completely.
Proper 16-bit support is the big thing for the next release and it's significantly less slow since it got multithreading support in 2.8. Still slower than Photoshop, though.
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