What percentage of them would expect to receive zero praise and potential reprisal if they did report a security problem?

Yeah, sure, it's depressing that people aren't courageous moral heroes, or motivated to go above and beyond, most of the time, especially about boring stuff or things likely to get them in trouble.

Guess what? That's one of the areas where management is supposed to be earning its money. One of the differences between an effective organization and a trainwreck is how good the flow of information is: are important observations from the periphery being collated and passed on so that HQ can actually achieve a coherent larger picture of the world? Are directions and information passed back down usefully informed by that picture? Or do you have unrealistic demands and buzzword nonsense flowing down; and soothing lies flowing up?

This doesn't mean that 100% of employees are innocent('insider threats' are a subset of 'people who wouldn't report a security breach', since they create them; but not a terribly large subset); but if you have this problem on a large scale, that's because your organization is dysfunctional.

If you are serious about using bitcoins for transaction purposes, it seems pretty clear that there is a role for something more secure than 'wallets' running on people's shoddily-secured systems(or, god help us, 'cloud wallet' bullshit); by design, there isn't anyone in the ecosystem to soak up the fraud as a cost of doing business(which is what allows, say, absurdly pitiful CC security to survive), and the usual efficiencies associated with networked computers make stealing the things a great deal more efficient than stealing cash one wallet at a time.

If that is the idea; then sure, a 'bitcoin chip', is probably not the worst way to handle the problem(now, why any OEM would pay extra for the chip, the packaging, and the board space, rather than, say, just re-using the 'trustzone' stuff that basically all ARM cores have, or coaxing the 'secure element' that they are embedding to support some other contactless payment scheme into handling bitcoin related data, that's a much harder problem to answer). Assuming you don't fuck it up, it'll allow you to have a 'wallet' for bitcoins that isn't a total security disaster, is actually vaguely convenient in real life, and so on.

If the idea actually involves any 'mining' (beyond whatever bare-minimum might be needed for a wallet to initiate a transfer), though, this idea could scarcely be dumber. Bitcoin ICs are power hungry, achieve essentially zero gains from decentralization(modest resistance to datacenter fires, I suppose; but substantial additional bandwidth and control-node costs, plus the inability to concentrate them where electricity is cheap); and have so far become obsolete at a rate even faster than that of most cellphone components. Many of them don't even make it to customers before they burn more energy than they 'produce' in bitcoins; and the ones eating battery power, and baked into a cellphone for its entire life, sure as hell aren't going to do better.

At least the ones you keep at home are as efficient as electrical space heaters at converting electricity to heat, with some free math thrown in. In mobile devices, that isn't a virtue.

So what's the plan? Conceptually adequate, but probably doomed, smartcard-esque IC designed to implement a secure wallet; or utterly bullshit and completely crack-addled plan to distribute compute load to the worst possible places?

Exactly. I'd argue that there was, early on, a largely Libertarian organization known as the Tea Party which was primarily concerned with sustainable and minimal government, but that it was, like Libertarian populists movements before it, taken over by Conservative interests as a vehicle for social conservatism.

There's also the problem that TVs tend either to be cheap crap for the cost sensitive(a market where Apple has little hope, much less an advantage), or one component of a larger, often partially customized for the room, 'home theater' setup. The latter is the place where customers might actually be willing to spend more money to get cooler stuff; but Apple has a very, very, tiny product lineup compared to the demands of a home theater integration type; and has a fairly tepid history of playing well with others and not shoving their pro users under the bus because they want to iterate their product line at consumer speeds.

Not only is the TV market as a whole a bit of a bloodbath, the TV market for which Apple would be most capable(systems nicer than those purchased more or less purely on price; but cheap and consumer grade enough that they need cooperate in only the most basic ways with other hardware) is especially harrowing. Since TVs are a keep-it-simple-stupid sort of device, there's virtually no UI/UX difference between the cheap crap and the midrange, it's just a question of how nice the panel is.

At least with computers, it is very often the case that cheap computers are a recipe for regret and sorrow, so Apple's strategy of 'we are going to charge you more; but give you the product you actually want, even if you don't know it yet' often makes people happy. With TVs, people who think that they want a big, cheap, screen are usually correct.

Whatever they encased it in was on the seriously lightweight side. 30 minutes in acetone and the case dissolved right off, leaving the PCB and all the ICs and passives in pristine condition. That's not 'tampering', that's 'cleaning'; and the device appears to have rolled over and wagged its tail by way of resistance.

If you are serious, you at least use the same stuff that the ICs are packaged in, which tends toward the 'black as sin and harder to remove' school of adhesives. Hot nitric acid will usually do the job; but you need to know what you are doing if you don't want it to remove the contents of the package at least as enthusiastically as it removes the package; since destroying the contents defeats the purpose of the exercise.

Exactly. The Tea Party and similar ultra conservative factions are forcing Republicans to keep fighting culture wars that the majority of American society has already moved past. That may win Republicans votes in Congressional and state level races, but in the long term it is unsustainable. Just look at a map of Obama's 2012 victory. The Democrats are making inroads in conservative states.

The problem for.Republicans is that their own political machine is strangling them, forcing candidates on voters that voters are far less likely to vote for, or even if they do, are so noxious to voters elsewhere that it has the same effect.

If the Republicans can't figure out a way to marganilize people like Ted Cruz and prevent them from grabbing the microphonez they're doomed.

It's almost as though the FBI is being hamfisted and incompetent again; but that couldn't be right...

Now buying homebrewing gear will join buying hydroponic gardening equipment on the list of 'completely legal things most likely to cause the DEA to batter down your door and shoot your dog.'

That'll be fun.

Translation: Another loser blaming everyone else for his inadequacies.

While I find his preaching about the moral rightness of what he does, and our duty to endure whatever shit he wishes to shove in our faces to be deeply obnoxious; it would not entirely surprise me if this little experiment by the carriers ends up going...badly.

Ad-blocking at the client end('client end' includes routers, filtering appliances, etc. under user control, if the applicable network is large or geeky enough) is simply the right of the individual to run the software of their choice on their hardware, to best serve their interests, in action. Running a public HTTP server doesn't give you some special right to dictate how the output is formatted for display.

Ad-blocking at the carrier level, though, gets risky fast. Whenever an ISP starts deviating from 'dumb pipe' operation, you have to start worrying about whose interests are going to win out, and how dramatically. Especially risky if (as is the case with quite a few cellular companies and ISPs) they also have a side interest in advertising, consumer analytics, a media arm, or other properties that could benefit from a little traffic meddling. We've already seen some of the more obscure WISPs provide 'ad blocking', then inject their own ads over the originals, worst of both worlds.

Ad blocking is well and good(and, frankly, until the advertisers can clean up the ghastly security situation, they have no justification for whining. Ads are easily the most dangerous part of most parts of the web you'd admit to visiting in polite company); but anything that gives ISPs more control over traffic is to be watched with considerable concern. You don't think that a plan to stick it to google is going to stop at blocking google's ads, do you? Not when they could use their privileged position on the wire to achieve the same tracking and advertising that google actually has to offer attractive services to achieve...

Yes, instead you create an inflexible currency system based on assigning arbitrary value to a physical commodity.

Outside of its industrial uses, gold has no more intrinsic value than a lump of dog shit. I mean, why not peg your currency to Renaissance paintings?

Since value is relative, then being the best currency means being the best currency, even with the shortcomings.

So far as I understand it the US has carried debt uninterrupted since the Civil War (maybe even before). Even in times of war and national emergency (including a few self-inflicted ones like the Tea Party trying to go kamikaze), the US Government has demonstrated its will to honor its debts and back the US dollar. It may be overvalued by some standards, but in general, I think the US dollar remains, and likely will remain for decades to come, the most important currency in the world. It really has no competitor.

No shit. The one thing bit coin seems very good at is enabling black market exchanges and corruption. We all know how Silk Road was such a warrior against criminal and corrupt activities!

Apparently a helluva lot of Argentinians DO NOT agree with you, and just as importantly, or perhaps moreso, international markets do not agree with you.

Your economy and government are being horribly managed, and you're suffering for it. Quit blaming the rest of the world for your domestic problems.

Argentina, like most Latin American countries, would do well to toss the Presidential system. The US, by and large, has lucked out, in no small part to what Bagehot referred to as Americans' "genius for politics". But in other societies, where the legislative and judicial branches have remained stunted as compared to the US Congress, SCOTUS and the Federal Courts, all the Presidential system does is deliver near-dictatorial powers into the hands of the President. The checks and balances may exist on paper in countries like Argentina, but the reality is that legislative assemblies and courts become little more than rubber stamps.

A parliamentary system like the Westminster system would, I think, work far better. The titular head of state of a parliamentary state does hold some potent reserve powers, but is restricted from using them in all but the most extreme circumstances. The "effective" government, that is the governing Executive, only survives so long as the legislative assembly retains confidence in it, and ministers are normally chosen from among members of the legislature, and thus, at least in a nominal way, remain equals to every other person sitting in the legislature. In a parliamentary system, the titular head of state represents a sort of negative power; in that he or she deprives the effective executive of absolute control of reserve powers and prerogatives.