The Daily Nerd (January 20th, 2014)

The Daily Nerd (January 20th, 2014) #

US prosecutors ponder what to do with multimillion-dollar Bitcoin hoard

US prosecutors in Manhattan are sitting on a multimillion-dollar bitcoin gold mine. And it could get much bigger. Federal authorities hauled in 29,655 units of the digital currency — worth $27m or £16.5m at current exchange rates — through an official forfeiture by Bitcoin this week. The bitcoins had belonged to Silk Road, an anonymous online black market that authorities say was a conduit for purchases of drugs and computer hacking services — even a place where assassins may have advertised. It was shuttered after an FBI raid in September, when agents took control of its server and arrested the man they say was its founder in San Francisco.

Programmer debunks source code shown in TV and movies

Source code pops up on screens and in the background of television and movie scenes all the time, but one programmer finally paused a movie to figure out whether the code was accurate. British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming started a blog called Source Code in TV and Films on Jan. 3 after noticing that code used to reboot the futuristic space station in “Elysium” was actually taken from an instruction manual for Intel x86 processors.

Ampere to get rational redefinition

At present, an ampere is defined as the amount of charge flowing per second through two infinitely long wires one metre apart, such that the wires attract each other with a force of 2 × 10−7 newtons per metre of length. That definition, adopted in 1948 and based on a thought experiment that can at best be approximated in the laboratory, is clumsy — almost as much of an embarrassment as the definition of the kilogram, which relies on the fluctuating mass of a 125-year-old platinum-and-iridium cylinder stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris.