If you start putting stupid autoplay on stories, they cannot be read at work. And Slashdot will die.

What the heck is wrong with you guys?

I'm really worried about your breaks braking. Are you sure you didn't mean brakes breaking?

I guess that depends on your brakes, lucky or otherwise.

Gosh, such pun.

I'll be here all weak.

So we could have a torch (sorry, flashlight) that only works in sunlight ... ? I'm not sure I'd buy one of those.

>> refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable ... what? ...

Or did you mean

refactor the law, it's bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.

Or possible

Refactor the law, it's bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.

Dammit, you're supposed to be a geek. Learn the grammar.

And you are right, I haven't had my coffee yet.

I wrote my first bit of code in 1970, in FORTRAN, and now, at 59, I still like coding. It's not where the money is, so I mainly do architecture, but coding is much more fun.

Is it hard to learn the new stuff? Yeah, it is. Definitely harder. The new frameworks tend to be pretty huge, and rely on lots of fairly random assumptions - "convention over configuration". You need to pick up a big heap of conventions, which is painful.

On the other hand, the basic structures still shine out. Async here, sync there, message there, update there, abstract everywhere ... It's easy to miss the fact that years of programming have nailed the basics - probably when you write code in a language you are familiar with, it tends to work. Usually fist time.

But yes, learning by doing is the best way. Try it, you'll like it.

Bat damn, there are a lot of frameworks these days.

Er yeah, well maybe. I used to do a fair bit of cruising. I admit the idea of an unmanned cargo ship barrelling down on my unsuspecting sailing boat is a bit scary. But on the other hand, do they ever keep watch in the open ocean anyway? ... I confess I doubt it. Might be an improvement.

Net neutrality is about source of data, not about the type of data. It still allows for QoS for voice and other real-time data uses. All it says is that traffic must be treated exactly the same depending on the source/origin. So you aren't allowed for example, to slow netflix down but let hulu go through at full speed, etc.

One should not minimize the value of knowledge either. I'm a lot more scared of ignorant smart people than of ignorant idiots. You could argue the point that trivia isn't knowledge, but even then, some basic knowledge of culture, cinema, politics and sports make for better rounded people. Most of the cultural questions have to do with influential people and it's still worth knowing about them, if only to know how they influenced trends or some such.

Indeed. All three of them too!

Ha - our multimillionaire bosses definitely do not sit amongst the cube farms in the bank where I work.
No, and they have made it far worse - try "Activity Based Working". You are supposed to change locations depending on your activity. Sounds ok, but this is what actually happens:
You come in and get your laptop from your tiny locker. Then you search for a desk. There aren't enough desks, so if you are late, you will search for a long, long time.
Ok, you've found a desk. You plug in your laptop - with luck it'll connect to the screen , network and keyboard. You try and do some work amidst the clamour.
And now it's time to talk to Jack ... but where IS Jack. You don't know. So you spend half the day wandering about trying to find people, and advising other wandering lost souls where someone might be. (No, we don't have a mapping system. I proposed and developed one 2 years ago, but they won't install it ... I don't understand).
If you have to leave your desk for a while you are encouraged to vacate it, but you don't because then you won't find a desk at all.

I don't know who dreams up this stuff - obviously extroverts, but apart from that - are they sadists? What is the point? Could anybody in their right mind believe this would be an improvement on the miserable previous cube farm.

Sure, but as far as intrinsic utility is concerned it doesn't matter when I get involved with bitcoin ... well, in fact it does: right now the price instability and general uncertainty mean it is far better to not get involved, wait for all this nonsense to sort itself out and join the game once everything is settled, stable, and bitcoin is actually being used purely for its intrinsic utility. In other words, it's better for me to ignore it for a few more years at least.

I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it. The reported result sounds like a mildly interesting result that happened to pop up in the first pass.

Given the advanced tools available these days for graph mining (largely developed for social network analysis among other things) I suspect some rather more interesting results may start coming out soon. What may seem hard to track on an individual basis may fall somewhat more easily to powerful analysis tools that get to make use of the big picture. I bet there's some interesting info on cliques and exchanges that could be teased out by serious researchers with some decent compute power at their disposal. Pseudonymity may be even weaker than you might think.

Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.

Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then trouble may set in.

* significantly here means, say, double digit percentage change in price every minute. Bit coin is a long way from that currently, but is headed in that direction.

Being primarily a mathematician and not a computer scientist or engineer I've used Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Magma and R. I've also programmed in Python, Perl, C, and Java and dabbled in things like Lisp and Haskell.

All the "math" programs on that list are terrible programming languages; they work great as interactive environments for doing (potentially symbolic) computation, but writing code in them? Ugh. If I actually have to write scientific computing code it's going to be in Python using numpy and sympy, or C if I need performance.

All the different math programs all have their strengths and weaknesses: Matlab kicks the crap out of the other for anything numerical or linear algebra related, both for ease of expression and performance; R has far more capabilities statistically than any of the others -- data frames as a fundamental data type make that clear; Magma is incomparable for the breadth and power of its algebra, none of the other come remotely close; Mathematica and Maple are ... well, sort of a poor jack of all trades that do most things but none of it very well.