Here is a better lesson: Store your money somewhere an entity with the strength and resources of the US Government guarantees you against fraud or mismanagement.

If my bank blows up I will get my money back.

I understand that many of you may not trust the US Government, but I do, at least in the matter of FDIC insurance. I don't trust the kind of people who work on Bitcoin; I believe they are generally "survival-of-the-fittest" type people who will blame the victim for not being sufficiently well informed if they suffer some kind of a loss. The next time an exchange fails, regular people will lose their shirts again but bitcoin aficionados will still think they are at fault.

Good point. Playing with a libertarian cryptocurrency is gambling. Only the people who dedicate their lives to understanding it "deserve" to keep their money.

This is the core flaw of libertarianism: you assume that everybody has the spare attention to worry about everything for themselves all the time. Food inspections? Tough luck! Everyone should know which brands are safe and which brands are risky. Bank inspections? Pshaw! Everyone should know which banks are run well and which banks aren't. It's the victim's fault. Regulation isn't needed because only suckers will lose out.

As long as you can keep convincing suckers that BitCoin is a replacement for a proper currency, you can keep soaking up their money by taking advantage of the fact that the rubes won't be quite as aware as you of the flaws in BitCoin.

This kind of automatic naysaying because of a rare use case is why awesome projects don't move forward. The most vocal objections to progress come from people who rely on an unintended side effect of the interaction between complex pieces of software.

Oh, wait, I forgot. "Terrible news" means "I might actually have to remember to disable TRIM support if I A) buy an SSD, B) use TrueCrypt, and C) rely on shadow volume support."

If you, or anyone, is relying on the plausible deniability feature of truecrypt enough for its failure to be terrible news, I would think you would remember to check whether TRIM was enabled or not before using it.

Heck, maybe even TrueCrypt could write a test to see if TRIM was enabled before allowing you to create a shadow volume. That might be a really useful feature.

Agree.

I didn't realize how much I hated the IOS7 user interface until I accidentally used an app that launched with the IOS6 controls. Oh my god! I could read them. I could see what each item in the scroll bar said. I could identify the differences between states. I could see what the controls were telling me to do.

Then I have to go back to IOS7...

My daughter's school just purchased a few classrooms full of iPads, and received a gift from the parent teacher association for electronic whiteboards with projectors.

Yet on the opening day of school I was sent home a list of art supplies (markers, crayons, glue sticks, construction paper) that the school couldn't afford to buy, and they wanted each parent to buy and contribute supplies to the classroom.

Skip the die size. What's the SPECint and SPECfp? Do processor makers submit these numbers anymore?

Any other metrics are secondary.

I read this as "Sega Master System Keys Are Retrievable." I was sadly disappointed.

The iPhone UI was beautiful, responsive, clear, consistent, and usable.

Metro is none of those things.

It has nothing to do with whether it was "Bill Gates" or "Steve Jobs"; one project was done well, and the other was done badly. Of course, when you think about it, Steve Jobs had a solid design sense and stuck to it. The Microsoft team (not sure exactly who) have absolutely no concept of what a user interface needs to accomplish, and no managers are willing to tell them that their UI designs suck.

This is a consistent problem with anything designed in the "Metro" interface. Problem is, Metro lacks a design language to communicate intended usability of the design. Back when GUIs were new and becoming adopted in the mid 80s - early 90s, the Apple design team very carefully ensured that the Mac's user interface communicated at every point a display of what options were available. It used a consistent interface so people could, by exploring, discover all the features that were available. By using consistent "cancel" and "undo" features that were highly prominent, people could feel confident that they could try something, see what happened, and see via group boxes and menus how items related to each other.

Metro lacks all of this. There is no "menu" that lists available tasks. Tasks that aren't available in the current mode aren't greyed out, they're completely invisible; so you have no idea if you're looking in the right place or not. Related objects aren't grouped together. Forms don't layer on top of each other, so you don't know what happened to your old work - did it get lost? If you go back to the old mode will your changes still be there? Have they been saved? Stashed somewhere? Did they take effect?

An internship should clearly be:

- For a well-defined project;
- For a limited time;
- Paid (at a basic level);
- As much work for the employer as it is for the intern.

If you're not mentoring your interns heavily, you stand no chance of developing a talent pipeline. I wrote about my experiences with an internship program here: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/18/lessons-learned-from-training-interns/

The critical aspect is that you have to have the available bandwidth to mentor and supervise an intern. You have to give them clear goals and a clear chance to succeed.

Whether or not it's okay for Nepal to decide on filming rights, please be careful about trotting out this meme.

Mindless deference to authority - "You get to set the rules, I have to obey them or play with someone else" - is what leaves our society stagnant. If something is in fact a stupid rule, it will only get changed when enough people speak up.

Part of the problem is that our imperial metrics are rounded to "convenient multiples of 5" in some cases, and "significant fractions of one" in other cases.

When you see 1 1/4 cups, or 55 mph, or 3 1/2 miles to the exit - there's a good chance that the measurement is inexact or unnecessary. Nobody actually paced out exactly 18,480 feet and placed the "3.5 mile" sign at exactly that spot. They placed the sign and filled in the best available number in the most convenient unit.

We get in trouble when somebody gets assigned the job of adding "km" to all the road signs. The person looks at the text on the sign, plugs it into google, and changes the "3.5 miles" sign to "5.6327 km". That's not helpful! It's no surprise people get upset by that.

If you actually re-measured the road, or simply rounded to a reasonable level, you could replace "3.5 miles" with "5.5 km" and be fine.

Indeed! We're losing access to the common airwaves! I demand a return to a libertarian paradise where anyone can overconsume a shared resource until the resource is so depleted that nobody can have access to it.

Dear libertarian, one day you may learn what Winston Churchill meant by "Democracy is the worst of all possible forms of government, except for all the other forms that have ever been tried." Unfortunately that day is not today.

The Davidsons did very well indeed. They used their profits from Math Blaster to buy a little videogame company called Silicon & Synapse.