In fact once someone has one of your Bitcoin addresses, they'll be able to see and track all transactions involving that address, including "shuffling" into new addresses. One can even construct a whole graph of transactions starting from some known bitcoin address since the chains of transactions are absolutely transparent for everyone. I guess it's a dream come true for the intelligence and data mining agencies.

And yes, the only way to opt out of that transparency is to use the laundry and mixing services - the chain of transactions ends once you put your sum into the service and retrieve them back - since you (most probably) will get other people's coins. Just be careful not to put too much since you may get back your own coins. Also, such mixing service may not be free.

This article discusses transparency and anonymity issues well:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity

So the article says 1MW, the author's video shows 1MW, and the youtube page says "it fires an intense 1 MW blast of invisible infrared 1064nm light". And yet a single anonymous comment saying 1kW is more trustworthy.

I wish I had the mod points to vote for that comment.

Check his other comments and submissions, he appears to be on a mission.

How's that "News for nerds"? We have many more outfits that are more suited for political news like this. I'm tired of all this recent creep of political garbage over /.

I'm wondering the same...

Yes, I never understood why so many pay attention to Joel's inflammatory rants.

I don't even want to start on his company's product (Fogbugz). Seriously, ASP/VBScript translated to PHP? And then inventing a new programming language just for a web app with ability to output in several other languages? Ugh.

Sounds familiar: http://seoblackhat.com/2009/07/10/link-pyramids/
By the way, if blackhat SEO's describe this technique in the open, it's either already well known, or its effectiveness has been diminished to the point where hiding the details isn't worth it.

Steve, is that you?..

It's more like "Gattaca". But you are right, the ups and downs were already considered in the movies, with the emphasis on downs.

But now they are optimizing for another, even less standard database (Cassandra), tying themselves down to it with non-standard query syntax. What was your point again?

The thing is, the stuff they missed in their SQL queries doesn't even need a MySQL wizard in blue cape to grok. There were no JOINs, no subselects, nothing high SQL magic at all - an average self-taught DBA would spot the suboptimal index usage. They should have totally solved it themselves.

The funny thing is that they still can't skip "a very skilled optimizing DBA" step even with the NoSQL solution. They still need a database architect, and they still need to optimize their queries. But this time, finding a good DBA would be much harder since I imagine the number of NoSQL specialists (and in them the number of experts specializing in Cassandra) must be much lower than the number of good MySQL DBAs.

Of course, now that they have a system that supposedly scales with a simple addition of new hardware to the farm, they may get away from optimization for some time - if their DB architecture is good.

As several MySQL experts already noted, Digg isn't even using the indexes that provide maximum performance in the query that they present as problematic for MySQL:
http://mysqlha.blogspot.com/2010/03/index-only.html
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Getting_Real_about_NoSQL_and_the_SQL_Performance_Lie/

So you are right about the NoSQL fashion trend. Looks like for some companies it's easier to throw a pile of cheap commodity hardware driven by some NoSQL BigTable-wannabie at the problem instead of carefully optimizing queries and indexes for the best performance.

But Facebook's PHP is also a webserver, as evident even from this story headline. Hence the question is valid.
I'm too wondering how nginx + PHP/FastCGI compares to HipHop as a webserver.

since when a torrent is illegal? its just an ascii file with some Bencode encoding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bencode

download a .torrent file
open it with: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=31306 Bencode editor
and tell me when you find the k1ddy pr0n seal clubber W4rez.

disclaimer: you won't.