In this particular case the middle provide a valuable service, they keep a merchant's accounting simple and the middlemen take all the risk.

Using something like coinbase, a merchant never sees or touches a bitcoin. The merchant does all their pricing and accounting in fiat currency (dollars, euro, etc). If a customer wants to use bitcoins the merchant sends the fiat price to the exchange, the exchange returns an equivalent bitcoin amount and a bitcoin payment address (the exchange's), when the coins are received the exchange informs the merchant and most importantly credit the merchant's account for the exact fiat amount originally specified. regardless of the coin's current exchange rate. The merchant's accounting is not complicated by new IRS rules regarding bitcoins (its an asset not a currency) since they never touch a coin, nor do they care about coin price fluctuations.

I think there's some disturbing parallels to the zombie/ebola outbreak scenario.

The movie "Contagion", while kind of lame, sort of came close to delivering it. 28 Days Later wasn't bad, either, but a little too zombie-like to be "realistic."

It's not hard to imagine a real pandemic where there's a disease with a very high mortality rate, a long incubation period before debilitating symptoms occur but a very short period before obvious but benign symptoms occur that make the infected easy to identify.

I could see a situation like that being a lot like a zombie outbreak -- the infected know they are infected and likely to die but have several weeks without symptoms that make them unable to cause havoc. At some point those infected would probably start to react/strike back at the uninfected as the uninfected pulled back and stopped wanting to have anything to do with them.

I've bought new releases because I always wanted a faster phone, my wife gets my year old model (making the annual upgrade marginally more justifiable) and "because I work in IT" (hey, my wife buys it..)

But this time around money is a little tighter and the only feature I really cared about was phablet-sized screen, and wouldn't you know it, Apple delivered.

I do think the smartphone as a concept is kind of running out of meaningful upgrades of any type. CPUs are plenty fast, screens are crazy high resolution and LTE speeds can often beat random wifi connections.

Someone is going to have to bite the bullet and start making dockable smartphones that can drive laptops/desktops or something really a bigger leap.

Directly below the video I see a link "Hide/Show Transcript", and clicking it expands and shows the transcript.

Ah, so people who hate hipsters and who were hating hipsters before it was cool...those people would be called...hipsters?

No, "grandpa" or "the crazy old guy down the street".

Now get off my damned lawn, you backy wastards! ;-)

They think the other person has a superiority complex so they beat them to the punch with their own. Basically if you call someone a hipster you are probably covering up your own insecurity and couldn't think of a more creative insult.

LOL, that sounds like a very hipster thing to say. Sounds very meta.

Can I get this translated into the standard "nerd, jock, student council, and stoner metalhead" cool kids/dorks magic quadrant we used to have in the 80s?

Unless it's a hipster thing to do that. In which case I'm pretty sure I've never qualified.

Usually in the novels the surrounding areas/states/countries block the roads and shoot anyone trying to escape a contaminated area.

I wonder if these kinds of deaths are included in the model.

Is it sad that I've actually written VAX assembly before?

As someone else who has done it, no. At least, not to someone else who has done it.

I still find myself floored by the fact that someone, somewhere thought it was absolutely necessary to have an assembly language instruction for calculating polynomials.

Well, you're describing what was the PDP/11 architecture ... and by that point, people knew it was something which came up often enough to want implemented in hardware. Because things like FORTRAN could benefit from it.

It's also the platform which gave us UNIX. So, in terms of pedigree, I'd say it's up there.

Hell, that platform gave us standardized memory/disk chunk sizes, and all sorts of other goodies we take for granted these days. This was back when Digital did some really cool things.

OK, I was never that much of a fan of VMS, that much is true. But the hardware and its descendants had a lot going for it.

Good times.

Or a more vague description and question. Like "Officer, how exactly did you know the location and contents of my client's cell phone data?" Somehow I don't think many courts will accept "Officer Y told me" (hearsay evidence, inadmissible) or "I can't answer because I signed an NDA with the FBI" (secret police don't often go over very well with American jury).

Exactly. All this NDA needs is an admissibility test in court "Will the officer tell me how he knew my client was at X?" "I can't, I signed an NDA with the FBI" probably will not fly.

It's usually not worth it on small purchases, but with bigger ticket purchases I will often ask for a cash discount. Sometimes they counter for less than 3% and then I just lay down a credit card and say "No, thanks, I'll take the credit card points". Some are smart enough to give me the 3%, but I'm more than happy to have them eat the 3% and take the points.

Why doesn't somebody build a couple of encrypted paired bluetooth headsets and just provide end-to-end encryption across the distrusted network?

I know it's sad, but hide your PhD

If he's spent the last 6 years getting it, and hasn't got other relevant experience in that time ... then the big giant gap in his resume will make him even less employable.

Because, when they ask WTF you've been doing the last 6 years, and you go, "err, ummm, I was getting the PhD which isn't on my resume" ... what do you think happens next? I doubt it's the one where he gets the job and everybody has a good laugh.

If you aren't going to fess up to it, why take it in the first place? And if you have to pretend like you're some n00b straight out of school (except with a 6 year gap not actually working), you're really screwed.

You may need to downplay it, or put some context around it, or try to phrase things in such a way as helps you ... but if you lie, or leave a 6 year gap in your employment history, you're probably screwed.

Hell, if you have to, be proud of it, highlight the fact that you did really cool things and still actually coded, but that you've realized that academia wasn't a route you were looking for, and just want to get back to playing with cool stuff.

Some hipsters wear suits. I've seen them.

Their fancy modern cut skinny suit, the skinny tie ... and shoes with toes that extend several inches past their feet ... oh, and the Justin Bieber/swirly haircut, that seems to be mandatory.

Of course, the sad thing is we now have a bunch of middle aged geeks who were never cool, trying to come up with a definition for hipster, which we're clearly not qualified to understand -- so there's limited utility in it. ;-)

I don't think people are looking for someone with a PhD as a software developer. You're overskilled.

By the time you have a PhD, you're expected to be the guy in charge of developing cool new technology, or working in academia.

I've known one or two PhDs in comp-sci who worked in the private sector. And they've been responsible for creating and developing new technologies for a company ... and I think they'd gone back and gotten their PhD after having been there a while.

What kinds of jobs are you looking for? Because I can't imagine someone is looking for a PhD to do C++ development, and the perception may be that you're overqualified and looking for a temporary job until something better comes along.

PhDs are researchers, not code monkeys.

Back when I was a code monkey, if we got an application from a PhD we'd have tossed it. Because either you're aiming really low, only going to stick around a little while, or are going to try to rebuild everything the way you'd have done it in a perfect world. At least, that was the perception.

The PhD was on a very technical topic that has very little practical application

And that's kind of the problem with a PhD. You've spent 6 years working on something with little practical application. You now are looking for jobs which don't need a PhD, and wondering why nobody is hiring.

Whatever you'd wanted to be when you grow up, you may have taken software developer off the table.