We're not waiting for another Einstein or Newton. They've always existed in the world of academia; tons of great geniuses, many of them on par with some of greatest men in history, have been working tirelessly over the last century. It just takes more than one man and one lifetime to prepare the soil with knowledge and insight for a breakthrough like relativity.

Time complexity aside, insertion sort makes sense to laymen, bubble sort not so much. At least not that much easier than mergesort, quicksort and heapsort. There are ways to organize code that make those slightly more advanced algorithms easier to read.

Bubble sort has a problem that it is not painfully obvious you'll end up with a sorted list; a layman only sees a lot of swaps and it takes a little bit of non-layman thinking to believe in it.

With heapsort you first use function names like InsertValue and RetrieveMinimumValue to encapsulate the voodoo, and if the reader believes in these functions he'll understand the purpose. The voodoo part is less straightforward, but it still can be organized in certain ways that's easier to understand. You can name operations with the proper level of abstraction and granularity: RemoveMinimum, FindNewMinimum, SwapParentChild etc. A layman would most likely get stuck only at the lowest levels, that is understanding how FindNewMinimum works, and I don't think that part is harder than bubble sort.

Mergesort and quicksort are more easily understood by laymen iteratively, when you go bottom-up, rather than top-down by recursion. With similar abstraction like above you can reduce both of them to a structure that makes sense to the laymen except possibly at the bottom level; I personally think for mergesort even the bottom level is quite straight forward (merging lists), while with quicksort the proof lies slightly more outside the scope of the code.

These, of course, are not the most desirable codes for professional programmers.

There must be some direct cash made somewhere by an insider. Perhaps some people were secretly holding some shares of Nest, or the VC behind Nest?

Just like OOP eventually breaks down into CPU instructions, and you can use any Turing complete language to implement anything, I think he has a fair point. It sounds like a way to design a language so that complex event/trigger type stuff are easier to implement and debug systematically, perhaps using a slightly different way of thinking. It might not be a fancy thing, but I don't think there's anything wrong about giving it a name.

You have no idea. The point is they don't just sit there and starve to death; they will do anything to stay alive. They will become thugs, they will rob and rape and wreak havoc.

If you think you have no right to kill him, it may be to your benefit to give him some spare food, so he will not jump on you and take away all else you have. If you let him survive and get a reasonable education, perhaps he'll become useful to the society.

There will be societal costs when you try to save this money, and it's not the richest, who don't pay tax yet can still get the best protection from the system, that will take the most damage. It will be you, the middle or upper-middle class bystander who doesn't walk with a bodyguard that will be the first target of an assault.

Law and morality serve to regulate the behaviour of people, but only by acting along with human nature, not under the foolish assumption that people will play along regardless of how the law is written.

While it's often easier in certain ways than doing "real" work, it's also less of a leisure activity than it seems. One could be anxious that he didn't kiss enough asses, for example. I know I hate it.

For most people it's already troublesome to meet people all the time for business, especially when you don't always enjoy their company. A lot of these CEOs would rather spend time with their family, actual friends or perhaps mistresses. Some, though, can find themselves enjoy the act more than other work, while still treating it seriously and develop actual skills for it. Arguably we can say the same about coders who like to code.

I won't say they're "figured out". Many A's are not very laid out very adequately, some aren't comprehensive and thoughtful. In the long run there are still many concerns; for example, network security scales with mining pay out which gets exponentially smaller, which is a sustainability issue of which the effects are not fully predictable. All in all it's still in experimental phase but the initial goal was noble and the outlook isn't too bad. I share you sentiment, however, that too many of the comments here are ill-informed.

Some people use it to say nay to strong statistical results backed by solid scientific investigation to causality, but the quote is exactly for you kind of folk who look at statistics, come up with their own theories and believe in them willy-nilly without ever thinking about the responsibility to go through the process of formal validation. Perhaps there's more junk food or even nutrition level in general. Perhaps parents don't have as much time to bring kids outside or guide them to play sports. Perhaps more people live in cities, where there's simply less space to run around; I live in a place where you need to queue overnight just to book an indoor basketball court, all year long. Perhaps the reproductive disadvantages of genes related to obesity have been alleviated by modern technology and some change in societal values, so obese offsprings have become more common. Perhaps there's a kind of commonly used product, not even food, that specifically induces some kind of hormonal disorder which leads to obesity. I can give you lots of possible explanations and none of them are any worse than yours.

You also have to know that the demographic that sits in all day, every day, to play video games is quite small compared to the entire population. Many kids play games, but it takes a certain amount of obsession to be indulged, that's why gaming nerds are always a minority. Either way in many cases I doubt videogames genuinely displaced exercise; given your data you can't say they'd otherwise have done more sports, a very significant portion could have still watched TVs or read a book or something. Moreover, it's not so easy for a teenager to become obese just because of lack of exercise; adolescent metabolism is high so it takes a middle-aged some regular aerobic exercise to match, and kids don't have that many years to build up their weight; there are often causes that played bigger roles, such as uncontrolled eating and stress.

I'm not exactly comparing JPY to BTC; I've mentioned many examples that a currency can be seen as such other than being non-volatile, and JPY is one. And also to refute your simplistic statement that instability is a cause to economic failure.

The thing is, in a way, you're basically saying BTC will fail because it's too small. Real world currency spreads are small because there's both large trading volumes and arbitrage is often easily exploited. It may or may not go away when it becomes larger.

It's not bad to compare BTC fluctuations to spreads at currency trading kiosks. After all, these kiosks survive, and I'd bet real money (not Bitcoins) that their total worldwide trading volume is more that that of Bitcoin. One of my key points was that BTC does not have to support a full-blown nation's economy to be seen as a viable currency. It only has to be usable in markets of enough variety and size.

Physical trading will be a de-link and the outlaws will use it. It kind of defeats the purpose of using public-key cryptography, but in that regard it's no worse than cash, and there may be some external incentives that push people to choose it.

Major currencies are stable because they are freakin' large and are often regulated. Apart from printing money the goverment can participate in the market directly to change the temporary prices. This happened many times when speculators were driving the prices crazy, like earlier for CHF. In the late 1990s speculators tried to pump and dump both THB and HKD, succeeding to break the Thai economy but didn't do so much to Hong Kong. Weak economy and currency volatility is more like a correlation than a one-sided causation. Besides, the current low volatility in most markets is actually a relatively new phenomenon. It is also noteworthy that many well established players in international commerce have their own ways to mitigate the effects of currenct fluctuation and regulate their businesses, such as using options and hedges and changing money flow strategies, or simply shoving it to the consumers. JPY has seen very high volatility as a currency recently but it doesn't kill commerce. It isn't easy but it isn't disastrous either. There are also many other accounts that the volatility risk is still mostly low compared to handling money in some countries with the most corrupt governments and banks. Many currencies of relatively stable countries actually have rather large spreads when traded in many places by normal people, so there are may ways people expect to lose money to price differences in buying or selling. If you are not building an entire comprehensive economy of a large country around Bitcoin, but rather aim to creep in to different markets worldwide, there's still a lot of room for growth.

It could take a long, long time before something is found to be useful. People have been studying prime numbers for a few millenia but it's only when computers came out that they attained rockstar popularity in the real world. The rest of mumber theory may have little direct use, but without a massive pile of those "useless" theorems and a bunch of very talented people who have explored the field so thoroughly you won't have good reason to believe that RSA does what it does. There are researchers who focus on practical research, but those can only be done on top of the soil of deep and broad fundamental research. Without fundamental research the practical guys would run out of ideas to exploit.

I share your sentiment but it's unfortunate this is the way the world has progressed.

People get hold of land when it's cheap, then a city is built around it. These landowners may have helped a bit to develop the city over generations, but ultimately it's the many other people who choose to come to the city and settled down that make the city a good place to live, and the land valuable. Early land owners reap the benefits of the increased economic activity on the land they own, then they become rich and powerful.

Up to a less peaceful level, wealth and power disparity induce revolution, but after every revolution the society is just reshuffled and new self-serving elites pop up the same way they did before. But over history, the lives of people are improving, and the world becomes a teenie bit fairer. Bitcoin may just be like that; it's all the same crap but overall it's a big change that might promise a better world.

I personally hope Bitcoin would fail but the many better versions of it would succeed, so that there is a better likelihood that things would turn out "fair".

At least that would give us better voters. Letting people recognize good political decisions is better than making them successful.

Didn't you see the phrase "lesser extent"?