> It tells me that "some" people are ignorant and racists

Half of people are below average intelligence.

Once the infrastructure is in place for the 'right to be forgotten', it will become much easier to create 'Unpersons'. Orwellianisms bathed in faux Human Rights?

That would be how Manna ended: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

bitmessage

Doing Math is mental exercise. The only real way to get any real benefits is to just do it:

http://www.google.com/search?q=the%20secrets%20of%20mental%20arithmetic.

http://www.google.com/search?q=1001%20math%20problems

I recently picked up "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary" and this post made me think of the the story. A quick check gives a time frame of 150 years ago, and maybe everyone that works at the OED isn't familiar with the history of Dr. Minor. If he truly was a "Madman", I wouldn't put it beyond him to make up sources for some of his many contributions.

After trying to get them to support Linux and even offering to do the development to get it to work with Linux they informed me that the hardware requires a binary blob and that Linux would never be supported.

Some other developer also found an easy way to pull money off the chip without permission using a bit javascript and I wasn't too impressed with the design and security.

There's a hard limit (1000?) transactions per chip so once you go over you need a new chip. I found that quite odd but maybe that's the limit to the amount of transactions this "anonymous" cash system can hold.

From the last paragraph of the article:

We donâ(TM)t really know how this coin is created. You canâ(TM)t have a functional money without a basic transparency.

We know exactly how this coin is created! At least those of us that know how to read the technical specs and source code of the implementations. It is a strictly designed mathematical implementation that will release a certain number of bitcoins at a certain rate over a set period of time. Maybe to a guy that is used to the money supply tap being turned on and off on a whim might not understand that concept though.

Maybe we should stick to the instruments that the people on *his* side designed so that *we* have absolutely no idea how they work in managing to bring the global economy to halt except at the very top.

So what I think we need, is for the core team for each major toolkit to sit in a room and try to design an extensible network transport that they can all agree to use. With a core set of features, and perhaps some toolkit specific extensions. Perhaps ending up with a process similar to the way HTML has evolved over time.

http://xkcd.com/927/

I see a story but it's devoid of links. Does anybody know where the papers can be downloaded?

Michael Bolton, is that you!??! ;-)

I've just started using Windows 7 at a new job and a minor configuration setting (the theme) will bring it back to a mostly XP look/environment, at least for the overall UI. It actually has a slightly better task bar where you can drag and drop buttons to different ordering locations, which was something I've wished for for years in XP. Combine that with a couple registry settings to enable focus follows mouse and XKeyMacs and it's almost a useful environment. Almost.

Not that there's anything wrong with your comment, but I was pointing out that ISPs will still know which sites you are visiting (by IP address). This is a well known problem in secure communications; they know who you are talking to even though they don't know what you have said. And with the current belief of guilt by association, that will still be a problem.

Think 'dissidents read slashdot'.