I'm not really deep on Bitcoin, so this probably needs to be proofread....

Think of bitcoin as a ledger. Any time you get bitcoins (mining, giving bitcoins) the transaction goes in the ledger. "5000 BitC => wallet 0x748a53cb56" or whatever. There's fairly good crypto making sure it's a valid ledger ("mining" is actually you proving the crypto work to make it valid - you get paid in coins for validating the blockchain). There's no "unique file" per se. There's no single bitcoin.com/blockchain that everyone supports. You have a copy of it, and the crypto makes sure its the same as everyone elses. (interesting issue if the blockchain gets so big that its too big for mobile/embedded devices). There's some edge cases as far as timing (including the "transaction malleability" flaw) that mostly seem to be worked out, if you pay attention to Best Practices.

So, the ledger says you have 5000 BitC. When you put them in MtGox. You in effect hand this to the 'Bank'. They now have your BitC. Now, they do their thing - they made money on processing. Think like PayPal transaction charges more than any bank loans.

Now, something happens that takes away those bitcoins. Can be fraud, can be "transaction malleability" (but in this case, was unlikely to be that). Either way, their BitC stash is gone, meaning yours are gone too. Can you track them? Theoretically, since everyone can see the ledger. In theory i can track numbers or BitC moving in and out, but not "your" BitC.

So... you went from having 5000 BitC to "having nothing but trust" once you gave it to MtGox. You truly lost it, once MtGox had its wallet emptied, either internally by fraud or externally by attacks, because at that point there's zero value in that trust - the coins are gone. In some ways, i don't know how anyone gave their money to an exchange. There's no guarantee they'd ever pay you, either in BitC nor cash. The fact it worked as well as it did is a shock to me.

I know regulations can't solve everything. we're all human. We're fragile, stupid, and too easily bought. Regulators and regulation writers are all those.

But through all of this, i think of "the sign on the bar that says no backpacks on the bar".

Whenever you see a sign at a place, that says "no something_or_other" its probably from experience. For a while everyone had their backpacks onthe bar. They took up space, and then people started knocking food on everyone else. At some point, we realized this "liberty" to have backpacks there sucks for everyone, and there was a sign.

So.. a "bank" that has no internal controls? Those internal controls there for a reason. Sarbannes Oxley? Maybe poorly written, but there for a reason. Glass/Steagal was there for a reason. Regulations on who can open accounts are there (usually) for a reason. People who say "aww the rules suck, we'll be much better off with no rules" get burned easily.

Ha, that's sweet. I should try that sometime. single user mode in emacs.

This story is a replicant...

But I personally have nothing to hide.

A form of this I like is "I have nothing to hide from people I trust". The NSA is way past the trust range now.

And just because I'm not doing anything illegal, doesn't mean I don't have things I don't want private. Medical things, pr0n habits (which the NSA does use against you). I don't want them with leverage they're not entitled to.

I forgot if it was the NSA or the CIA that investigated ex-gfs for no reason.

They don't just make it easy... they make it near impossible to not have one on the phone. Check youtube once, and the entire phone is a Google device. How'd hangouts get there?

Reminds me of my favorite UNIX joke:

Emacs would be great operating system if someone just wrote a decent text editor for it.

And it will become the year of the Linux desktop....
And the Hurd will ship...

These are not trivial issues, especially when Google's roadmap for Android is mostly about competing with iOS at the high end.

Wasn't KitKat designed for lighter footprint on smaller devices? They're not abandoning the low end. Also, computing history is littered with corpses of companies that tried to optimize for current hardware, but spent so much time/money that the hardware caught up to "bloated" software, and they were beat. Check out how this happened withWordPerfect. where they were so happy they used assembler, but lost to nimbler Microsoft. Having a business plan that depends that hardware doesn't progress much hasn't been too lucrative.

The writer needs to remember that the market changes rapidly. The iPhone as first introduced would hit this current market with a thud. Webapps on a 2G mobile browser? Yeah, not gonna sell.

Palm WebOS tried this already. Came from a company with some weight in hardware. Landed with a huge thud.

What about developers? This might be the toughest nut to crack.

Ya think?

There's going to be a massive chicken/egg problem here. I don't pretend to know apps in developing countries, but Facebook dropped 19Billion to buy network effects in developing countries. It's still a big thing.

And lets not forget Tizen, and Sailfish. The OS waters they want to plunge into are not even empty. Good luck. I like Firefox, but they have huge headwinds.

We had a source code leakage through email, so first they did for google/yahoo/hotmail. Then they expanded it to any social network site. Now it's on every https site.

The latter "every" site sucks. Every site gets cert errors, and parts of the site work or fail oddly.

It's spelled Expresso... Right on the side of my Dodge Neon

Im not quite sure, but I'll assume you're not trolling...

What's unmonetizable? They sell subscriptions at a buck a year. so they get 200-400+ million people paying a buck a year, and they need to pay 40 or so employees out of that. They don't store messages, so their server costs don't include storage. These messages by and large are small, how many are just "k", so bandwidth costs aren't huge. Line made money by selling stickers and themes, so there's that.

So, Compaq had buildings, computers in warehouses, parts all over the world, and contracts for future purchases. And people, they had a lot of workers. We used to say how big a company was based on how many employees it had.

WhatsApp has a huge list of users and maybe 30-60 people (I've heard number of engineers, not number of employees). For some reason what's been stuck in my head with the acquisitions and attempots (Snapchat) is that now employees seem to be liability not an asset. Fewer people to fire, fewer separation letters, fewer stockholders. Before we had terms like Human Resources. Now we don't even pretend that employees are an asset.

I'm not communist/socialist/back_in_my_day_get_off_my_lawn guy. I'm a systems guy. Like supercapitalist Henry Ford, I think the economy does best when people get paid and they can they then have money to buy things. I think a lot of people have lost the connection between Consumer Purchasing power and paying people a wage.

Mark hopes to see the "top 50" apps from the Android and iOS stores available for Ubuntu on mobile.

Hopes?

Hmm, RIM/Blackberry tried to throw money at this, didn't work. Magic wishes and dreams will not cause a company to spend money for a developer to work on a new style platform with unknown revenue chances.

It's a split.

Broadly speaking, the Republican party is really a coalition of two conservative groups, but two very different, almost diametrically opposed conservative groups.

You have the "fiscal conservatives" who think everybody should be hands off anything economically. This is the "free markets" Republican you tend to think of.

Then you have the "social conservative" who think everyone should be righteous and whatnot. They want not only themselves to be righteous, but you as well. To force you to live by a religious code that you don't follow, you sometimes need government interference. The joke being here "the Republican party wants government so small it just sleeps in bed with you and tells you No."

These groups were kind of glued together in the Nixon years, and really cemented in the Reagan years, It kind of explains some of the multiple-personality-disorderness of the current Republican Party. I'm surprised it hasn't blown up yet - do you really think a true Tea Partyer has much to talk to Rand Paul about? The doggedness of corralling "rogue" Republicans and painting them as R.I.N.O kind of keeps this all together.

That being said, many supposed fiscal conservatives really aren't so much. "Fiscal Conservative" Sarah Palin bloated a small city's spending so much she sent it into a debt spiral. The largest recent expansion of government was under Bush #43. Before that? Reagan. Wasn't the quote "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" - not very fiscally conservative. "Tax and spend" Clinton ran a fiscally responsible government and ran a surplus (which goes into the above - Bush had cash to burn, and so he did). Paul Ryan wants to gut government programs, yet he wouldn't be where he is today without them - he kind of skirted on Social Security benefits to get through college. Fiscal Conservative makes a great bumper sticker, but many Republicans seem to live by "please let everyone be fiscally conservative, well everyone but me".

You have people who disobey safety instructions and wander about the cabin when the plane is pitching and rolling, even with "Federal Law compels you to comply with all flight attendant instructions...." and you expect people to not talk because a 5'2 flight attendant asked nicely? Never gonna happen.

This is an example of "what's great for me sucks for you". For that shithead on the phone, s/he's breaking up the monotony of the flight and lack of blood flow to the legs with a fun phone call. It just hurts and annoys everyone else. Do you think at that point after being jammed into the middle seat with a seat reclining into his lap the caller is gonna care that the nice flight attendant calmly told them to knock it off?

Won't happen. Even with the Federal Law thing you'll still have people that try. And for someone who takes public transportation with "quiet cars" that depend on civility between people that is often ignored, I've seen a couple near fights on a 45 minute train ride with relatively (to airplanes) large and comfortable seats, fresh air, and the ability to walk around any time. How many fights do you think there will be on a 8 hour overland flight with Cell coverage? My body clock says it's midnight, time to sleep. This caller's clock say's it's 8AM, time for work. Do you think he's gonna back off? Do you think the cranky sleepy guy is gonna back off?

For those that say "let the market decide" this is preventing literal fistfights in the air where you'd probably need to vector 25% of those fight flights off to other airports, totally disrupting the web of flights that make up air travel today.