I work with a guy who likes to say, "You can write FORTRAN in any language." Coders who lack the care/ability to structure code cleanly and keep it maintained will have absolutely no trouble porting the same bad habits to any programming language/framework/platform/IDE/etc. The problem isn't PHP. It's "PHP programmers."

I'll admit the problem is more prevalent in PHP and generally in languages that are easier to get started in. To get a webapp running in .Net, you've got some structural work you need to do. To get a PHP site up, you edit index.php in notepad & FTP it somewhere. There's something to be said for a little barrier to entry serving as a wall to keep the riffraff out...

Whatever environment you work in, you need to have the discipline to examine any open source apps or third-party dependencies you're considering using. Check out the source, make sure it's reasonably well structured. Check the revision history to make sure it's updated regularly & relatively recently. A lively users mailing list is a good sign. If the project looks like crap, you need to choose whether you use something else, write it on your own, join the project and attempt to fix it or fork it, or just make a shit sandwich and take a big bite... None of that changes if you move to a different language.

That's not how any of this works... If there's less compute being thrown at mining, the difficulty level of each subsequent block drops until the total compute in play is able to solve blocks in an average of 10 minutes. (That's Bitcoin. Others have different algorithms.)

Mining resources aren't the problem, and mining isn't even a part of the services Coinbase offers. Coinbase's primary offering is an exchange to fiat currency. If the exchanges fall, the inability to easily convert crypto to fiat will affect the perceived value of the currency as it would effectively become less liquid. It's got nothing to do with the mining compute though.

The poor, poor oppressed company. It's awful they're being held accountable to the law like us little people are. So unfair!

Steam is a special case. If you can't run the latest Steam client, the licensing on your existing Steam games will stop working, and you won't be able to play them any more. They're making a change which because of DRM will make your old, not-updated games actively break.

It's reasonable they want to update Steam to modern technologies. It would also be reasonable if they left a legacy license server up that will continue to serve licenses to the last version of Steam that ran on those older systems.

Something nobody trying to sell "private blockchain" has ever adequately explained to me: If you have an entity or entities that you want to have full restricted control over the blockchain, why use blockchain? Have them store it in their nice plain old database, publish it on the web if they want, whatever. I can't see any way that burning a ton of coal to solve hashes improves any part of that scenario.

There's nothing about a 51% attack that involves breaking cryptography.

Most blockchains work by consensus of 51% of the compute power in the pool agreeing on a result being close enough to satisfy the difficulty level for that block. If you control 51% of the compute, you can make your result win the consensus every time. You're not breaking any encryption. Just steamrolling everyone else.

No, it's pretty different. Learning the theory is easy. Not really much to a 51% attack, theoretically. To apply it, you need to be the motherfucker with more computers than 51% of the rest of the motherfuckers in the world combined. You need to maintain that for several blockchain cycles to pull it off. That's a little more difficult.

The only exception I would see is in cases where government is currently accepted to be able to restrict speech. Calls to violence, speech that is directly criminal, threatening to an individual, etc. If you threaten to kill someone, post bomb making plans, say, "We should all go to Bob's house and get his kids, his address is..." Anything like that would still be outside protected speech and reasonable to block/remove. "[This agency] sucks," not so much...

It starts getting interesting when you consider libel. "[Agency] sucks." General insult, not really an accusation of wrong doing, protected, if not terribly original. "[Agency] sucks cause they killed my dog and kicked my grandma." Now that's a verifiable statement which (if false) is libel.

It's always Interesting Times when somebody important enough gets caught up in a spot where tech law and general analog law have been enforced out-of-sync with each other but now all of a sudden people are watching and aware of the disparity on the tech side.

"Political views" isn't a protected class that a private company is precluded from discriminating against. It *might* fall under labor discrimination in certain interpretations, but certainly not for a private company choosing or not to engage in business with someone.

You see a sign on a store that says, "Trump blows Putin!" or "Jail Crooked Hillary!" and on the basis of either of those signs, you choose not to provide your business to that store. That's not illegal discrimination. That's your right protected partially under the First Amendment. Twitter's position isn't significantly different if they choose not to do business with an individual.

That said, I can't imagine Twitter blocking anyone purely on the basis of their supporting a particular candidate. The people I've seen banned from Twitter have all crossed the line in terms of harassing people, inciting their followers to commit violence, or otherwise going far beyond simply expressing a political view. When speech turns into action, calls for action, or is directly damaging to another person, be it dox'ing, swatting, or just persistent abusive language, that's when Twitter boots people. And again to be clear, Twitter is NOT required to give people their "free speech rights" under the First Amendment because Twitter isn't the government, but even the government is generally accepted to be able to restrict individuals' speech when it falls into those categories. "Can't yell fire in a crowded theater," etc.

Under the current court ruling and general meaning of the First Amendment, nothing happens to Twitter. They have a constitutionally protected right to do that.

Twitter can block any follower of Trump or even Trump himself. When Twitter does it, they're exercising their free speech rights which are protected by the First Amendment. When Trump takes the same action, it's government censorship which the First Amendment generally forbids as it's the government denying someone their First Amendment rights.

Twitter is a private company. Trump is an agent of the government. The First Amendment has a different meaning for both of them because of their roles.

I wish I could believe that. I'm almost certain he repeats a lie long enough until he actually believes it himself. Maybe because dementia has set in or something, and he loses touch with reality.

Here's some reading comprehension to make everything better.

The judge found that Trump & staff, all agents of the government, cannot censor individuals in the public forum of Twitter by blocking them from Trump's Twitter account.

It said nothing about what Twitter can or can't do. As a private company, they can still kick Trump off if they so choose. The First Amendment limits government's ability to restrict speech. It has nothing to do with what private companies or individuals can restrict.

I'd lay off the cookies if I were you. The beetus might be affecting your eyesight.

Fair enough. All snark in my previous post hereby retracted. My apologies!

Happens to the best of us...

That's on the pretentious end of the curve. The practice is increasingly less common and has always been inconsistent. I've seen anywhere from nine to 13 as the cut-off. My middle school English teach was not a woman to be trifled with, and she said 13.

This one is actually hard & fast. When you have two complete sentences joined with a conjunction, you use a comma(*). There's no comma unless you have two separate subjects and verbs. "Bob went to the store, and he bought some milk." That's two complete sentences with a subject (Bob/he) and a verb (went/bought) each, so you need a comma. "Bob went to the store and bought some milk." No comma there since there's no second subject.

(*) And because English loves exceptions, you use a semicolon if there were already commas in the sentence that might be confused with the one between the two independent clauses. "Since we're talking about grammar, it must be a boring day; and it's also Friday." (Admittedly joining those two thoughts together is a bizarre usage, but it's the best I've got right now...)

The other case of comma before 'and' is the Oxford comma. There's a fair bit of debate on that one. When you have a list of three or more things, the Oxford comma before the conjunction can clarify meaning. "Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector." (https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/oxford-commas-nelson-mandela-and-stephen-king/) Putting a comma after demigod would change the meaning of that sentence significantly.

At your job, the meaning of professional writing has evolved. Your writing hasn't. Your unwillingness to adjust to the culture you work in out of some presumed sense of superiority makes you pretentious.

In your first sentence, the position of the subordinate clause, "being at least 10 years older that[sic] any colleagues..." implies that your job is at least ten years older than any of your colleagues are. To express that you have been alive for at least ten years longer than your colleagues, try, "At my job, where I am at least ten years older than any of my colleagues..."

Spell out numbers lower than 13.

Your second sentence is a run-on. You need a comma inside the closing quote after pretentious.

If you're going to complain about writing correctly, at least write correctly.

What part of even the summary much less the article made you think this was permanent? Unlock with passcode, and all is forgiven...