I wouldn't say that video gaming influenced me much, of course in my day (I'm an old fart) video games were arcade games. But no, not much influence. I write mostly business logic anyway, graphics are not really what I do. As for Mark Zonkerboyd, he can eat my hat. I don't care much for the boy and he can get stuffed.

In psuedo-skeptic world a thousand peer reviewed studies aren't worth a single paid Frank Spencer pro-fossil fuel shill piece in the WSJ.

This is another GLOBAL WARMING hoax!!!!! Ice is always melting!!!!!

Argumentum ad dictionarum is at the very least an informal fallacy. Attempting to argue about what really is a specialized definition of the word "tool" with a general definition you find on Google is tantamount to a fallacious appeal to authority.

There is an actual definition of the word tool. We are under no obligation whatsoever to use your private definition.

And you're not an expert, so your criticisms are largely meaningless.

They very fact that they were banged together by an intelligent agency makes them a tool. In general you can tell by close examination whether a potential tool is simply the product of natural erosion or in fact was used as a tool.

Piracy really doesn't scare the big studios that much. What does scare them is Netflix becoming the gatekeeper to their products.

I have yet to find a site that does that.

So you missed View In Desktop mode then?

I guess you could throw each one behind some sort of NAT router; maybe something like a Raspberry Pi, so that to the actual LAN they each have a unique IP. But even going for a low end computer-on-a-stick solution, you'll need a second USB ethernet adapter, or ethernet-to-WiFi bridge, not to mention it sounds like they are still air gapped, so can you reasonably get cabling to the pumps? So you're talking here about 20-30 NAT routers plus cabling. A big cost, with some security implications that need to be thought out.

Have you thought about talking to the vendor?

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.