Game Bug Makes 12 GB RAM Required on Windows 10

A hard drive paging bug in the Windows game "Batman: Arkham Knight" is addressed in it latest patch by offering that for Windows 10 users having 12 gigabytes of RAM installed would prevent them from having to page the hard drive during gameplay (archived). Unmentioned is that this almost certainly needs to be available RAM not committed to other memory intense processes. The Windows port of the was originally released four months ago on June 23, 2015 and for many purchasers has yet to achieve a playable state. This game is far from the first piece of Windows software to be fatally flawed to an unusable extent.

Interview with David Francois on Building a Real Bitcoin Business

Operating a Bitcoin business is difficult and, a lot of times is the first step down the road which brings pretty much 9x% to crime within six months to a year (archived). With the excess influx of Venture Capital into companies pretending as to have any involvement with Bitcoin, I sat down with David "davout" Francois CTO of Paymium, formerly known as Bitcoin-Central, to talk about the fundamentals from his personal experience in developing a Bitcoin company that can survive the ruthless climate of the world of Bitcoin. Continue reading

Symbolics Quadruples Revenue in FY 2015 on One USG Transaction

The privately held firm Symbolics which holds the remaining assets and intellectual property of the former lisp machine manufacturer Symbolics, Inc is reported on the US Government's spending disclosure site to have quadrupled its revenue over last year. The transaction is reported as being for: Continue reading

Operation Cyber Juice: Police and Their Favorite Drug of Abuse, Part 1

Back in September the Drug Enforcement Agency announced an action dubbed "Operation Cyber Juice" involving the bust of a handful of underground labs compounding imported raw anabolic steroid materials into oral and injectable preparations suitable for end users. Also busted were a number of distributors including persons dealing steroids at a LA Fitness club Franchise and at a Juice bar (archived). At least as interesting though, not very surprising is the number of underground labs and clearnet internet vendors who were not busted despite publicly declaring a presence in the United States. Continue reading

Xiaoxing Xi isn't a Chinese spy after all

Reports are coming in that the former1 Chairman of the Physics Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA – one Mr. Xiaoxing Xi – has had his U.S. Justice Department-drafted indictment2 for "wrecking"3 dismissed without prejudice to the refiling of charges4. Continue reading


  1. Xiaoxing Xi was regrettably relieved of his leadership post at Temple in May 2015 following this indictment. 

  2. Full indictment document here. The observant reader will note that this indictment obliges Mr. Xi to forfeit any real or personal property "derived from the proceeds traceable to the commision" of the alleged offenses to the Federal Government of the United States of America, and that this property be obtained by any and all means necessary. Just like that. Just because Peter F. Schenck, on behalf of United States Justice Department Attorney Zane David Memeger, said so. 

  3. "Wrecking" became a term of art in the former Soviet Union, wherein a political undesirable could be branded as a "wrecker" for, say, using too much concrete and trying to bankrupt the glorious state of the USSR, or even using too little concrete and jeopardising the security of the glorious state of the USSR. Basically, it like every socialist term in all times and in all places : a term devoid of specific meaning and therefore used as a catch-all for the vague and whimsical ends of the soi-dissant powers-that-were. The funny/sad part of recalling this fragment of all-too-recent history is that the United States of America, the current soi-dissant power-that-be, is reimplementing the exact same strategy right before our very eyes. We see this with everything from "racist" to "cyberterrorist" and we'll continue to see it for some time to come. 

  4. Full dismissal document here

Consumers Begin Revolting, Bitcoin Is Not Visa

Gavin Andressen stated early on in his pursuit of a hard limit that he wanted Bitcoin to scale to Visa levels, stating the payment network's transaction throughput as a frame of reference. There is a common misconception about the structure of traditional electronic payment networks – this has caused the lemmings of the Bitcoin world to set an unrealistic goal of competing with an industry that is filled with holes. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger prevents it from ever being utilized as a retail payment network directly. Continue reading