The IRS and many people, it seems, don't understand BitCoin. It doesn't help that the name also misleads in this way.

BitCoin is not analagous to actual coins, objects which can be exchanged. BitCoin is a distributed peer to peer bank.

Why is it a bank? A bank is no longer a store of actual physical objects, it is merely a transaction ledger. Transactions are logged that determine the number of tokens that a given account controls. Account balances and so on are merely a digest of this transaction log - the log is the thing.

BitCoin is likewise a transaction ledger. The rebuttal to the usual bone-headed arguments about people "copying" coins because they are just numbers reveals this. Unlike the transaction ledger of a traditional bank which relies on a lot of central security to prevent people writing to it, BitCoin welcomes people writing to it's ledger, and then farms out the task of deciding whether those transactions are legitimate to the network. Balances are again, merely a digest of the ledger.

A BitCoin wallet ... isn't a wallet! It contains no coins. The blockchain (aka the ledger) contains the coins (along with certificates as to who mined them, then subsequently, transaction records of where they were transferred). The wallet ONLY contains something that proves you control (or "the network agrees that you control") a given set of coins - your private key.

A BitCoin is not an asset you hold. Transferring coins is a service the network provides (like any other bank). If your wallet is destroyed, no BitCoins cease to exist... but the network now has no way to transfer them (unlike a real bank, which can fudge it because it shares control of it's ledger with no-one).

BitCoin should really be BitBank
Your wallet should really be your "pass key".

But you can imagine how quickly the banks would have moved against it if it was called "BitBank".....

BitCoin are not assets. BitCoin is a service.

It's true that there is no difference in security between

* A closed source, perfect, crypto component
* An open source, perfect, crypto component

If it's perfectly secure, the privacy of the source code makes no technical difference.

As above, if the security of your solution is perfect, privacy makes no difference - public can be much more secure than private.

The privacy of your solution DOES make a difference to other factors.

* Trust

People are more inclined to trust something they can inspect. If someone says "my security system is PERFECT... but you can't look at how it works", my first impluse is to think that they have something to hide. And that something could be a super cool proprietary technology, but it could just as easily be a gaping security hole a script kiddie could exploit. Given the fact that if you patent your super cool technology, the detail of it is public anyway, but I still can't steal it, the bias is that it's far more likely to be that your solution has problems, whether they be stupid mistakes, back doors for the NSA to exploit, or rude comments in the source code.

* Peer review

Good security is hard. Even if you're some kind of security savant, people think differently and someone may spot a gaping hole in your solution that you just have a blind spot to. Open, standard security technologies have multiple people poring over them looking for holes. There are people who get their kicks that way. Exposing your technology to as many of them as possible and letting them tell you what their opinion is, is the best way to evaluate your solution.

It's easy to come up with something YOU can't break. It's much harder to come up with something that no one can break. The difference between private and public is that you'll only get to find out AFTER something is depending on your solution not breaking.

Skype make a pretty big deal out of the security of their solution, but the truth is that leaked documents have made it very obvious that intelligence agencies can trivially intercept Skype communications - and we don't know whether this is because there are back doors, or because the security of the protocol is just crap, because we can't inspect the source code and there is no public documentation of the protocol. It's most likely there are back doors, because properly implemented crypto is not trivial to break. So this is a private system that many people trust, yet it's obviously not worthy of that trust.

So closed-source security solutions are not the best idea, for exactly the reason you propose that they ARE.. if you keep the source private, you keep the security holes private. It will just take longer for someone to exploit them, or it will be insiders that exploit them. If you open the source up, when holes get found... yes, some of them will be by bad actors. But some will be found by people with an interest in seeing them fixed.

That's the key right there - in the majority of cases, you need the combination.

As many have posted, some people are huge fatties with low cholesterol and well controlled blood sugar. This concurs with the above - they are lucky enough not to have the genetic components.

Type II diabetes is of low incidence in India, but of high incidence in those of Indian-Asian ethnicity living in Western cultures. What's the difference? In India, people eat differently and exercise more. Despite their increased genetic predilection to Type II diabetes, they don't get it from their genetics alone.

The assertion that it has one root cause is false - the human metabolism is a complex system with many factors. The fact that you can't control many of these factors seems to be a vast comfort to some folk, as if it somehow absolves them of responsibility - but it remains true that you DO have control over factors that by themselves can prevent you getting the disease.

I think this is one case where conspiracy theory is basically the truth. Big pharma has created one of the most systematic systems of scientific fraud on the planet - running multiple studies and carefully cherry picking only those that happen to produce positive results to promote their new drugs, over the old ones with expired patents being just one of the tricks they use. If you want to see an excellent discussion of it from a statistical epidemiologist, read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre.

In some cases, the new drugs have actually been proven to be worse than nothing at all later on, a fact that the drug companies almost certainly knew when they released them onto the market.

Believing that a company that is ostensibly devoted to improving the lives of people, but actually engages in this crap, just to make a buck, would deliberately withhold a cure for something in order to continue selling a repeat treatment? All too easy.

No, but it does mean that some of you who would have gotten cancer, don't.

As the original poster suggests, it's all about learned response to food.

My daughter likes processed crap as much as any 10 year old, but she loves home cooked food with plenty of veggies. Last Friday she was literally using both hands to cram the broccoli into her face (it was tempura broccoli, deep fried but basically nearly raw with a very thin coating of batter on a large piece of broccoli).

She was brought up with a wide variety of fruits and veggies in her life. Until she started dance lessons, where there is a little pocket money tuck shop, she thought that the only kind of sweeties was dried fruit. She has always received encouragement to try new things, and never been restricted from eating foods because they are "too good for children" or "too grown up".

On one notable oocasion when we were driving home from the supermarket we heard a "scronch, scronch" from the back seat like someone was eating an apple. But we didn't buy any apples. It's my daughter, eating a yellow bell pepper straight from the shopping bag with every sign of enjoyment.

I'd be inclined to agree with the sibling poster I see now as I write this ; you're not just stuck in a childhood, you're stuck in a childhood where your parents did you no favours from a food point of view. But I don't agree that healthy has to mean rough or tangy - even something as simple as lentil soup is very healthy but very consistent in texture.

I) Messing with software doesn't necessarily leave a trail. For example, a system by which your votes are tallied and the results placed in a file on an SD card for collation in a central location, relying purely on security by obscurity, means that you could mess with the data file in transit and no-one would be any the wiser.

II) It's easier to mess with paper ballots, principally because comptuer systems are understood by fewer people than slips of paper. For precisely the same reason, it's much harder to audit voting systems involving computers. Widespread fraud in paper voting systems is difficult to pull off, because the manual nature requires a lot of observers, and most people can understand handling votes in a trustworthy manner. Voting systems based on computers can be manipulated by a single agent, often without a trace. And the pool of people capable of auditing them shrinks the more complex you make them - mickey-mouse ciphers included.

Paper voting spreads trust over a large number of people. Computer voting concentrates it in the hands of a very small technically adept priesthood, much easier to buy off or intimidate. I'm the first to geek out about some cool new method of using crypto, but I've come to realise that as much enthusiasm I have for the technology, I'm not really comfortable trusting the election of my government to it because it's so easy to subvert.

I FOIA-ed the police to get the footage from their surveillance chopper. They fobbed me off for months and then palmed me off with some shitty lowres footage from CCTV cameras.

People should cryptographically sign peer reviews (and their papers). And journals should only trust signing keys that themselves have been signed by respected experts. The more respected you get, the more signatures your keys and papers get.

I thought so too, until recently, when their apparently inability to report many fairly significant events of social unrest has been very obvious.

There have been anti-government protests with tens of thousands of people marching against the current regime, relegated to 2 minute slots on the local news shot from a low camera angle to conceal the fact that there were 50,000 marchers (by the estimates of the police observing).

Coverage on the destructive privatization of our National Health Service is notable by it's absence.

Even if they are not wholeheartedly supporting the Tories, they would appear to be under their thumb.

That's because people are cheap bastards. They'd rather have medical residents who are tired to the point where they make decisions like they are three times over the legal alcohol limit, than pay to have more doctors. Hilariously, the USA spends nearly double what we do in the UK, but a lot of it goes on administration staff because of the whole insurance and billing thing. This is why you guys have such a hard-on for electronic health records ; automate all that shit and things get a lot cheaper. In the UK we just avoided most of it by having a single-payer system.

I used to work those marathon weeks (here in the UK, where they are similarly cheap), but I quit due to stress. So the vast sums spent on training me went largely to waste ; although I do still make use of my medical background in my day job which is writing software for medical purposes.

That's only for one limited elite class of taxi drivers, the London Black Cab driver.

The exam you're referring to is called "The Knowledge". Minicab (pre-booked hire car) drivers in London do not need "The Knowledge", but driving a black cab has a certain cachet that means they can charge higher fares - you know you're getting a driver that knows his way around beyond the cold and unadorned data that a GPS navigator can provide. The privilege for this differentiation is that only licensed taxi drivers are allowed to pick up fares off the street - all other hire cars have to be booked through their controller.

The main problem that folks like the Black Cab drivers have with Uber is that the technology makes booking an Uber essentially as immediate as raising your hand and yelling "Taxi!", which erodes a substantial part of their competitive advantage. But as you point out, the same technology also makes their principal unique selling point (being able to navigate London without embarrassing pauses to flick through an A-Z) rather less relevant as well.

Arrgh, meant to include this link to a short webcomic biography of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand's observations about human nature are heavily skewed toward broken people, such as she was.

This is a woman who's mother didn't love her, who lied to her to take her toys away just so she could gain some social capital by giving them to charity.

Her observations are thus very pertinent in the light of a capitalist society such as we have, because capitalism is a system that treats people like that - as something to exploit for profit, regardless of their need. This is justified by the accurate observation that the striving that results creates wealth, but it is not shared appropriately - the "out for what I can get" mentality perpetuates the notion that, for example, the selling of a product is intrinsically more worthy than the manufacture of the product, when without the manufacture of the product, both the seller and the maker would be in equal penury.

Children naturally have a sense of fairness and sharing. The main reason humans developed big brains was not to figure out the world, but to figure out other people - cooperation was the "secret sauce" that elevated us above the other monkeys. I don't think the kind of human nature that Ayn Rand observes is our actual "natural" nature, but merely something that emerges from the interaction of humans with the capitalist system, a system which is observably dominated by those who do NOT have these basic human traits - corporate officers having more than their fair share of sociopaths.

I think it's fairly certain that it hasn't happened, or the church who had best claim to it would never stop braying about it. A verifiable spontaneous limb regeneration would be like religious gold.

Both EULAs I think, but also from the POV of the projects involved, they don't want to take the risk of contributions from someone with any significant chance of having MS code in their head, because it could open them up to a potential lawsuit later.