Plus the trolls are plentiful enough they don't need to PAY them to find a dissenting opinion!

Nice! That's pretty close to the view I had, about the same distance away, too. I wish my adventure wasn't before the days when everyone had a camera-phone on them, or I would have gotten some nice shots at the time as well. :(

There is one place better than on the ground. In the air, at about 1000 feet or so! I was lucky enough to get a reservation at the John Hancock tower restaurant on the 95th floor some years back.

This was in Chicago on July 3rd (when Chicago sets theirs off) and they are sent up from the water on barges just off the shoreline at Grant Park, near Navy Pier. They go up 600-800 feet to detonate typically, so you are nearly on eye-level or slightly above with the explosions! They are only a few blocks away so they are really BIG! Unfortunately, the windows are so thick on the big buildings, there is little to no sound to go with them, but they do pipe in the simulcast music of the CSO playing the 1812 Overture in sync.

THAT was the best way I ever saw fireworks!

Using blockchain technology for decentralized consensus.

If you are thinking about using bitcoin style proof of work, then I'd say that is a poor choice. It is an extreme waste of processing power, and it is not even needed for DNS. The purpose of the proof of work is to prevent double spending. But if you tried to perform a double-spending like action on a DNS system build on similar principles, the only damage you'd cause would be to your own domain.

But by all means, let's get data and hosting decoupled. DNSSEC provides the ability to validate records, wherever you got them from. But it still has the centralized authority. I'd rather see that once a zone hand over authority over a subdomain to a different public key, then a signature with that key has to be used to hand authority back or transfer it to a new key.

it it possible or even practical to identify a bitcoin as having been a "direct descendant" of a coin involved in a given transaction and/or as a coin that has been "co-mingled" with such a coin?

Definitely. That is easy to do. However since each transaction can have multiple inputs and outputs, the set of descendants is likely to grow over time, until eventually most bitcoins are descendants of that transaction.

it may make it practical to for major players and for that matter anyone who uses BC to "locally blacklist" seized bitcoins.

If there isn't any consensus in the "community", then such a blacklist is unlikely to have any effect.

If some miners decide to blacklist transactions involving certain coins, then other miners are just going to pick them up. If only a minority of miners are in on the blacklisting, then this is going to cause a fork in the blockchain. Other miners have to decide, which fork they are going to bet their resources on. If there isn't consensus on what to blacklist, there could be so many forks blacklisting different subsets, that each fork is going to become irrelevant leaving only the chain with no blacklisting as viable.

Even if you could manage to get a majority of miners to agree on exactly what should be blacklisted, it is of questionable value to the miners to attempt blacklisting. It could be seen as introducing a dangerous precedence for introducing blacklists. This would introduce a new and even more unpredictable danger to anybody owning bitcoins.

Traders could decide to blacklist certain bitcoins. This would mean you would refuse to accept blacklisted coins. But if you are selling goods for bitcoins, then you'd have to announce in advance, which coins you consider blacklisted, otherwise you'd have disputes where the buyer of goods says they have paid, but seller of goods says the received bitcoins are no-good. And as receiver of bitcoins you'd also have to decide how diluted the blacklisted bitcoins would have to be, before you'd accept them. And in all, there'd have to be consensus about both the set of blacklisted bitcoins and the dilution threshold. Otherwise nobody will know, if the bitcoins they are accepting are good or not, and without such knowledge blacklisting wouldn't have the intended effect, instead you'd just be rejecting arbitrary payments, you might as well flip a coin and say no-thanks to a certain payment.

I think the only consensus that has a real chance of being reached is that bitcoins are not blacklisted.

I was an Emacs dude for a long time and still use it. Then I tried RubyMine, and eventually upgraded to IDEA. The IDE features are sometimes handy. I also use vi very regularly for quick edits of small scripts.

I would no more stick to one editor than I would stick to one programming language. Right tool for the job is the key.

That's because whenever you try something socialist-ish it's implemented as corporate welfare. Instead of taxing the corporations and helping the people you're bailing out the corporations and handing the bill to the people. Your version of Robin Hood would involve trying to get a trickle-down effect by handing the sheriff of Nottingham more money so he could hire more tax collectors and guards. Or to use a car analogy it's like stabbing the tires and pouring sugar in the gas tank, then comparing it to a horse.

The intersection between stuff I'd love to do and the stuff people would pay me to do = Ø, particularly if I got paid to do it. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my job (37.5 hour work week, decent pay with overtime, 5 weeks vacation, interesting and meaningful work) but I don't love it and it's not something I'd do without the paycheck. If you can't really think of anything else to do than work, you must have a very gimped imagination. I'm sorry.

The first part you got right, the second I don't think so. From what I gather the photon is really like an "on and off again" couple, every so often they split apart to an electron and positron but almost instantly realize being on their own doesn't work so they get back together again. But in those brief moments they're single they're pulled much stronger towards parties, curving the path they take between our house and their house - not zigzagging.

Apparently over a 168000 light year stretch this adds up to a 0.0005 light year detour, they've not traveled as straight a line as the neutrinos have. Of course we already knew gravity bends light, but these quantum effects means it bends a little more than expected from the photon's mass. It's no wonder quantum mechanics can drive you crazy, God isn't just playing dice on top of that the dice morphs between 1d6 and 1d20 during the throw.

Oh there's plenty of hellholes left, but the remaining ones are mostly plagued by civil war, crazy dictators, massive corruption, lack of basic education and infrastructure or some other form of ethnic, religious, economical, social or political instability that make them unsuitable for running a business no matter how low the wages get. The extremely poor but stable countries are quickly running out, India is still lagging quite a bit behind China but after that if gets tougher and tougher.

Man, I wish I could sell at a loss with a 60% gross margin. Like all companies they make margins slim where competition is strong and large where it's weak or non-existant, but if you've ever had the impression Intel was dumping prices to squish AMD out of the market you must have lived in a different world than me. Dirty OEM tricks? Sure. Bleeding consumers dry by charging tons for extreme performance, long battery life or server features? Sure. Having superior process technology and pocketing the profit from lower costs? Sure. Force feeding the mainstream market IGPs to eat AMD/nVidia's low end? Sure. But I've never looked at an Intel CPU - and particularly a CPU+mobo combo since they have a monopoly on chipsets too and effectively set prices for both - and thought "wow, that's cheap"

To be fair, at the CEO level of a major company it's impossible to deal with individuals. I've worked for many years with project portfolio management tools and on that level it looks more like a knapsack problem where you have say 100 developers and doing project A consumes 30, project B consumes 40 and project C consumes 50. Except it turns out B and C is both eating the same pool of 20 that know one particular technology or they touch the same systems or users and you don't want two major overhauls colliding. And one project has a much better ROI short term, but the other is strategically important or one is high risk and the other low risk and so on. When you're at this level you're looking at whether you have the capacity and right mix of staff, not how well each individual is suited to their position.

You must understand that as a CEO you're dealing with layers of indirection, perhaps you can make some changes to HR policy that may over time help improve the composition of your workforce, but on the normal management timescale you're stuck with what you've got. And every company tends to have the employees that are favored by that system, rock the boat too much and you get issues with employee dissatisfaction, turnover and a management chain that resist you so mostly they focus on getting the business side right, what products and services should we be delivering. It's up to middle management to pick the aces and go to bat for why these people deserve such a big paycheck compared to others who also call themselves developers. But I will tell you one thing, the CEO might not know what's going on but he does care when the 100 man hours he was going to spend turned into 200, even if the rate was lower.

Obligatory Far Side

I think something got lost in translation. If it was compromised 2+ years ago, why didn't the developer pull this stunt back then? If he knew, he sure waited a very long time and NSLs don't expire. If he didn't know, how did he find it since development was essentially dead and how did the NSA know their backdoor was about to get exposed? The more logical explanation is that he's being forced now in 2014 to burn the 2012 version which was too good for NSA to let live. I think the people abandoning TrueCrypt now are led by the nose by NSA, not the other way around.

No, the point of a kill switch is to destroy the resale value. Same as an IMEI ban, once reported stolen nobody should* give you service

* not actually implemented worldwide, yet