Um? The only thing that gives the value to a currency is the shared trust in this currency. The "gold standard" or any other shenanigans are/where just smoke an mirrors to reinforce this shared trust. (Especially when going from minted gold and silver coins to paper.) But even the value of gold and silver coins is based on shared trust. Sure you can melt the gold and trade that, but there is not guarantee what the gold price will be in the future or that the next person will accept these coins.

Do you know how bit coin works? How do you "pre-mine" a crypto currency. The mining process is part of the running transactions. If today all bitcoin mining ceased, no transaction would ever be validated. This thing with bitcoin is, there are no tokens that need to be mined. The mining process actually is just a clever way to authenticate transactions in a decentralized manner. That the miner gets something out of it, is just a reward so that people provide the computing power to authenticate transactions. Mining just sounds cooler than authenticating transactions.

The alternative is to use tokens, but these need to be authenticated against a central authority... and that not a crpto currency as we understand it.

That does not compute. Why does a company, any size that is, need to convert heir daily/weekly/monthly earning in on go. What is so wrong about converting the payments into local currency as the payments come in. Sure it may make sense to batch some transfers so that the fees are minimized, but apart for that there is no reason to wait.

In addition this is somewhat self regulating, when a company starts to accept payments in BitCoin, it will start low and slowly grow. When it gets large enough to matter the market will have adjusted to the drain. In addition, if a significant amount is taken out of the market and the people continue paying with BitCoin, it means that they need actually buy BitCoin from other currencies.

The problem that companies face is that, if the services are priced in BitCoin, they don't know how much "real" money they will get. But mostly this is not the case; the services are priced, for example "5 USD payable in BitCoin, as by XYZ's exchange rate".

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow

You know, many engineers actually use the computing power given to them. Granted not all the time, but if a project compiles in five min instead of one hour, that actually means something. The complaining normally starts, because they know that with a better system they would not wait that long. On the other hand MANY other office computer users topped their "maxing out" the machine at around 2005.

I thought most of their servers where OpenBSD, not Linux... But yea...

Yes but you would not be able to actually empress this in C. Not possible! The best you could do would be something like:

void set_class_to_blue(Element* ele)
{
        set_class(ele, "blue");
}

foreach(dom, "a", set_class_to_blue);

Any if you inline the code, you can see what it does line for line and translate it to ASM.

Take the JQuery in contrast. That does the $("a") actually do? It creates an object that contains a classifier that may later evaluate to DOM nodes. On this object you then can call function; theses functions then operate on all instances. So the statement $("a").addClass("blue") is semantically equivalent to $('a').forEach(function (ele) {ele.setClass("blue");}). But it is not implemented in the same way. Even if you inline all the JS code, it will be hard to break it down to actual processor instructions (just the VM), because half of the time a semantic construction does nothing useful.

I am not sure if on purpose or not but their website is a classic example why ads are bad and distracting. Their website is loaded with ads for their campaigns, social media buttons, links to the extensions and stuff. The entire design looks almost like a terrible online magazine, that derides their article just so you will see the ads. It may that it is a bold sarcastic statement or they are hypocrites.

THIS is the only reason for C's existence. If solves one problem, remove all barriers between the programmer and the machine and still be a reasonable language. Assembly is the only way to program with less barriers, but that is not a reasonable language. C is useful in those cases where you simple can't trade speed for the programmer switching off his brain.

Ok I will bite. Now I don't claim that C is on the same level than ASM, but you need to compare it to current languages. Languages like Python or JavaScript, they abstract out almost everything about the machine you are running them on. With C you program against a reasonably close abstraction of the real machine. In many cases you can hand compile the C code to ASM.

Take for example the JS expression $("a").addClass("blue"). This expression written in C would take up something around 100 lines of code, simply because the machine you program against does not understand high level concepts. Even simple concepts like a string are not understood by C.

I love programming in C, but in whole ecosystem of languages it is on the low end.

There is a certain corundum you need to solve. If you sell your software from the beginning, there is a real chance that nobody will ever buy it. If you open source it it may become a huge hit, but you get not money out of it. Assuming that successful open source projects would also be stellar successes when closed source is nonsense.

Also equating that rich corporations are "ripping you off" since they would have payed you good sums, is also nonsense. If no open source alternative was available and they really needed the software they would have just build it themselves and certainly not payed you. Alternatively some projects just exists because the use of open source make the project viable.

The FED does not give money to corporations, they primarily interface with the government and banks. It also does not give money, it LENDS money to them. The trick employed here, is that in accounting terms money is added to the active and passive side equally and thus it balances out. Of course this is just smoke and mirrors, since under normal circumstances you actually need to have money to lend it to someone else, but that is not the case at the FED. In addition they get interest on the lending.

Generally I am not opposed to the notion of a central bank that can act as a lender of last resort. But in the case of the FED, "the Federal Reserve is as federal as Federal Express".

Yea, but writing a PHP application and attaching it to MySQL or PostrgreSQL and caching the entire thing through varnish or zend does not. Remember MediaWiki is basically implemented. All they need to do is scale out.

Didn't Google offer their ContentID technology for this a few years past? If you take something like that, the actual file hash is irrelevant, you take a "hash" of the content not the bits that make up the file. This mostly solves transcoding and watermarking.

+1 Funny