obscure maymays were never this appropriate

Or a 1TB+ 2003-2015 releases archive torrent for avid readers who are serious about this free ebook thing (beware: some countries may deem clicking on that link stealing millions of dollars worth of books).

Thanks obama!

Kinda thought it was part of the joke - as the riot happens regardless of color its actually pretty politically correct. The racist compiler warns about that, though (are you sure you want to be painted black?).

Pretty much. Combined with Snowden, US has come out of its closet and said "fuck this shit about moral facade". While nobody likes russians in the region (as historically their imperialism was still far worse), europeans are now between two grinding stones - one completing an encirclement, and second having a good pretense to "feel threatened". Interesting times ahead.

Remains to be seen if NATO members signed the faustian deal with lesser of the evils.

A good amp is the best antenna.
A good hill is the best amp.

Just to chime in with fun theory feminists and masculinists often forget about when they start sperging about muh gender online: The mean IQ scores between men and women vary little. The variability of male scores is greater than that of females, however, resulting in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution. What this means that yes, in absolute numbers, there are more males with above average IQ, but also higher amount of dullards, with women sticking closer to the center of the bell curve.

My personal pet theory is that back in the day, this didnt matter that much as computers were too much of a niche. When this niche became a mainstream subject though, this distribution (in absolute numbers) started to show. Overgeneralized pet theory: intelligent people flock towards computers, others to sports and other endeavors. In absolute numbers, theres more males of smae iq than females.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037%2F00...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fsc...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2Fs1...

It's true the economic restraints of COMECON bolstered DIY culture all across eastern bloc, a lot of which remains to this day.

It had it's downsides as well - the hardware at hand was often ancient and the planned state production we relied on for a lot of source components was very inefficient because of communist cadres - basically incompetent bureaucrats created a lot of e-waste by manufacturing useless junk (a lot of which was not salvageable even for DIY) - buggy ASIC clones, poorly done circuit boards, non-existent QA and braindamaged designs, you name it. Think incompetent CEOs of monopolistic megacorp wreaking havoc with nepotism/cronyism/office politics and there being no board to dismiss em. Thats what communist cadres were like, good technical designs and processes were rejected for political reasons way too often.

fukovo tetris2 represent ^_^

FWIW the title is a bit incorrect, as both hackaday posts deal mostly with computer scene in czechoslovakia, not soviet bloc as a whole - MM is recycling/abridging existing computer history series from root.cz into english.

Just the usual butthurt and sour grapes.

I'm hoping it will be a pleasant surprise. There is history of decent open software output from IBM, I'm sure sendmail "community" was pretty butthurt about Postfix too, as IBM simply took good protocol with horrible implementation and re-wrote the daemon from scratch and got it right.

virtual versions of their currency online.

It's really, really tricky to do - a decentralized peg to external fiat currency with no central/internal control on-chain.

a rather flawed version based on artificial scarcity

Well, yeah. The get rich quick pyramid distribution is necessary to induce gold fever and guarantee hype (as seen in perpetual carousel or half-assed alts dangerously overselling their wares). People still wanted the stable fiat peg for other stuff, eg on chain fiat/btc exchange. Not going to happen (unless you make it a underwritten fiat XCP/CC asset, at which point it's no longer on-chain decentralised) unless central banks and government bond markets are actually on that chain, ie internal to the system.

The same story for a lot of old and hairy codebases. Try glibc some day if you really want to see things.

A team with leadship in the realm of security

Yes, some people take an issue with that, fe:

https://blog.hboeck.de/archive...

Some naysayers are of the opinion that Theo & his peck are good at writing well designed software from scratch (eg openssh), however their "securing" of existing codebases (eg bsd kernel and libc) ended up in trainwreck. libressl is sadly the case of the latter.

For what it's worth, NCC is not some self-appointed security snake oils but industry behemot who actually does software assurance. They harbor a lot of auditing talent (iSEC partners from top of my head).

Conversely, your nirvana fallacy does not hold up. OpenBSD was "designed" to be secure, just to become a laughing stock for reasons you outlined. All code without formal proof (ie all of systems code written in C) is potentially vulnerable no matter what. All you can do is throw best auditing talent at it and hope for the best.

The mining operation doesn't give an advantage to early adopters

If it walks like a ponzi (early adopter with well timed exit profits massively), quacks like a ponzi (you need to recruit more suckers into the scheme to profit) and has feathers like a ponzi (greed is the main incentive to participate), most laypeople will perceive it as a ponzi.

That being said, calling it a ponzi is indeed not fair, as one attribute is not shared - ponzis or penny stocks, or whatever have no interval value at all, thus the inevitable crash to 0.

But when you tack some value to it, however dubious, (be it herbal medicine; or be magic internet payment system), and use ponzi as a carrier for viral marketing scheme, you get multi level marketing - or so called pyramid scheme. When pyramids crash, they do so to inherent internal value as determined by participant consensus.

People conflate MLM with ponzis often because of the many shared attributes. Just like recruiting for AmWay alienates your friends and family, so does bitcoin, as people realize the distribution is pretty much based on the same principle.

Bitcoin is of course here to stay, for better or worse, however I doubt it ever becomes mainstream. Too much of world population need to have this illusion of just world and will gladly accept keynesian system (with obscured unfairness) over aggresively austrian one for a long time.

Now now careful here with basement dwelling remarks, judging from the butthurt replies you've struck a sensitive chord here.

Currently, smart watch makers are desperately trying to do ton of stuff, and suck at most of it (yes, including showing time). These things can't be more than dumb screen terminal for the time being, yet most vendors are afraid to market it as such. You might be interested in pebble watch, actually a fun piece of programmable hardware on your wrists, compared to lobotomised, underpowered android devices, or outright obscure+irrelevant+proprietary systems.