YES. This is exactly the problem.

Those of us who understand the tech already understand that Facebook's Newsfeed is not a 'dumb pipe' and that it runs an extremely opaque and proprietary filtering algorithm. We realise that a lot of posts get silently dropped; we constantly switch from 'Top Stories' to 'Most Recent' to try to counteract this. Many of us use Twitter instead and crosspost to Facebook because we know that Twitter tends to deliver all posts rather than silently screen them.

But non-tech-savvy people - our parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts - don't realise this. They think that the posts they see on the Newsfeed are exactly and only what their friends are saying. They think that if they see something with a thousand Likes, it's because their friends like it too. And why wouldn't they? To them, Facebook is a messaging service, not a media service. They know that TV and newspapers filter and select content. But they don't see Facebook as a newspaper. Their prior examples of messaging services are the telephone, post office, and then email - all three systems are ones that place a very high priority, almost a moral imperative, on the message always goes through unchanged without alteration or censorship. If they thought about it - which they generally don't - they'd expect that there was actually something in the user contract that specified this, because hey, isn't that the way things have always been? Isn't there something in the Constitution about freedom of speech? They don't realise just to what extent the Facebook terms and conditions say 'we reserve the right to hide posts from you, and not pass your posts on'. They don't realise that Newsfeed is far more like Rupert Murdoch paper than the Post Office.

That's the scandal here. It's shocking and it should be shocking to all your non-techy, non-cynical friends to see Facebook proudly talking about how they deliberately manipulate people's Newsfeeds to not actually be a representative sample of their actual friends' actual posts.

Keep the focus on that. The scandal is about censorship, free speech, and trust, not the esoterica of experimental protocols. It's important.

How about this one? It is a little memory-hungry though - 128K of RAM isn't within everyone's budget.

The more relevant questions are "what is the size of the codebase of L4 written in an unmanaged language" and "is that unmanaged codebase small enough to mathematically prove its correctness" .

There is a reason why we layer systems on top of each other, and not just because we like cake.

Well look who natively counts in binary.

Hello Joshua! Give my regards to Dr Falken.

Managed code does one very important thing: it guarantees that elusive quality you've just named 'goodness'. (With respect to memory access, at least).

Goodness or otherwise of arbitrary unmanaged C code is a Turing-complete quality that, we've painfully discovered, cannot be reliably detected by either a compiler, a testing regime, or the entire planet's worth of expert C programmers given unlimited access to the code and up to two years time. That's how many coder-years? A lot.

Goodness of managed code? It has that quality. Period. And we can go on with our lives solving instead of creating problems.

Arguably all the recent security holes in Java are exactly because they wrote extensions and libraries in C/C++ and not in Java.

A real language - like, say, UCSD Pascal in 1978 can compile itself to its own virtual machine just fine...

But admittedly the resource requirements to host a system like that that are pretty steep - you'd need at least 128K of RAM. Still, I like to dream that one day....

Esperanto? le mi varkiclaflo'i cu culno lo angila! You mean Lojban, I presume.

13 months is a little annoying, yes; you have to split the months on week boundaries to make quarters. But we actually do have 13 lunar cycles in a year, so this naturally aligns the months with the real moon. And we keep 7 day weeks, which is a win both because we're used to our week, and because 7 days is a natural quarter-moon. And no more "30 days hath December..."

Thing is, a workable Earth calendar never is going to be evenly divisible by powers of 10, because it has to stay aligned with astronomical cycles which are subtly varying; even the Sun and Moon don't strictly align. So everything's going to be a bit of a juggle. Frankly, I think this is the best alternate calendar design I've seen in a long while.

Because it's the second stupidest deliberate misuse of computational capacity to artificially create digital scarcity since Bitcoins.

The correct way to distribute large files like movies online is to copy the bits as locally to the endpoints as possible, and cache them pervasively at all levels of the network. Nothing would need to be sent more than once down any given cable. It would be fast, cheap, make use of the Internet as it was designed to function, and give us near-unlimited bandwidth.

But that would mean that those bits don't become artificially scarce and can't be tracked and audited by the media companies for copy-protection purposes. So instead of copying, we stream them over and over and over again, generating terabytes of needless, duplicated data traffic, and creating huge bandwidth storms that suck all the capacity out of the Internet.

tldr: Video streaming is expensive because it was designed to be. It wasn't designed by or for you, and it doesn't benefit you.

Yeah, I hate it too when I score a counter-riposte to my opponent's flying parry and there's just a beep on the referee's scoreboard and no blood.

o_O ... a what now?

Well, now we know what John Titor was really looking for with his leet IBM 5100 mining rig.

.... not even a kernel panic?

$615,000 in drug, terrorist and child porn money? Or assuming some innocent parties involved in Bitcoin, at the very least $615,000 of juicy leads and contact details for the people who are dealing the hard stuff? Yes, it's conceivable that they perhaps might. You know, since tracking and catching thsi stuff is pretty much the number one job of all the West's police, intelligence and militaries at the moment.

Lie down with Bitcoins, wake up with whatever it is that Bitcoin merchants are selling. And possibly the FBI knocking on your door to ask nicely if you have any drug dealers or terrorists in your address book.

Yes, because the advocates of those currencies are loudly crowing that the entire point is to enable criminal acts. That it's a perfect money laundering service and that this is a great thing.

But if a government responded rationally to this widely advertised lawbreaking by shutting down the people who launder money and the mechanism they're using to do it, that would somehow be immoral, and anyway they wouldn't do it. Because, um. Government bad, government inefficient, Bitcoin rules, FBI drools?

I'm shocked, shocked that Bitcoin exchanges might conceivably be running into money problems related to fund and transfer freezes from ongoing international drug investigations. That's simply not possible, because Bitcoin!