Well, for this example, yes.

Diamonds are pretty worthless. Their price is artificially inflated by the De Beers cartel. If you don't believe me, try selling a diamond - take your wife's engagement ring down to the jeweller and get a quote. Now compare the price to that of similar stones available in the same store.

So, nothing to do with the robbery though - the diamonds are still worthless beforehand.

Not Invented Here syndrome is a terrible thing.

Why the HELL would you want to write your own DNS server, much less want to run it on MySQL.

If you want easy analytics from SQL reports, use a proper DNS server (my instant thought was one that uses LMDB - which PowerDNS supports, apparently) and write a program that dumps the data you want into a MySQL instance, which is the Unix philosophy - tools doing one thing well.

acq may be "acquisition" - perhaps one of the incumbent banking players is buying them out. Or the mafia. Or someone.

Well, not unless your mattress is made of adamantium and has a passphrase protected lock, can be redundantly backed up in multiple locations, and every time you stuff a handful of cash into it that cash is automatically available from each of the backups... no.

The design of the currency does include charging for transactions, because the peers in the network do the processing - it's always been there to encourage people to actually participate. But the transaction charges should be small compared to standard banking.

Ding! We have a winner. Anyone who uses an exchange as a bank didn't grok the point of a distributed P2P transaction log in the first place. I would have thought it would be a key point for all those libertarians as well - personal responsibility n'all.

Keep your own wallets, keep your keys backed up, and keep them offline unless you need them. ALL these Bitcoin theft stories have one thing in common - the wallets were accessible from a public server. You would have thought that all the Bitcoin banks would have crashed right after the first story as people transferred their balances into personal wallets, but apparently people really do value their convenience much more than their hard-earned Bitcoin.

At a minimum, have a "current account" wallet that you maybe carry around on your personal devices like a phone, and a "deposit account" which you keep the wallet for OFFLINE. You can still transfer TO it any time you like - you only need the keys to transfer FROM it. Store multiple redundant copies of the keys somewhere secure - you might even want to go as far as storing a paper wallet in a real safe deposit box, but a USB memory thumb in your desk drawer and a backup thumb somewhere else is probably secure enough - you do remember your passphrases, right? And they're not the same for each copy of the wallet, right?

Recharge your current account from currency exchanges, or from your deposit account. Transfer any balances that are too large for comfort to your deposit account. Now the only thing that can destroy the value of your coins is... oh, everyone else who's still dumb enough to value convenience over personal responsibility. Que sera.

Excellent irony by using the MS Word lsquot and rsquot characters :-)

The emphasis should be on encryption, not physical infrastructure. You can't audit, control and secure physical infrastructure for an internet, because it is by necessity, spread out across a large physical volume. You definitely can make it uneconomic to analyse the traffic.

Of course, this is probably an intentional oversight - all that infrastructure work is a great economic stimulus (or "pork barrel project" if you like). Why cloud the picture with reality when you can both spend billions of Euros on a jingoistic boondoggle AND still be able to collect SIGINT from your own people without difficulty?

While I admit that as a programmer I will inevitably have a skewed point of view, I view it as ill-advised.

A computer is useful primarily because it is NOT a special purpose tool, but a general purpose one.

Whitelisting cripples your computer. If you can't run software without it being on a whitelist, you can't even write a shell script, or a VBA macro. Your computer stops being useful as a general purpose tool - only the software that has been approved remains useful.

Yes, I get that most users are numpties and probably do need to be kept from hurting themselves. But this kind of policy cuts down the tall poppies - the ones who actually can make their computer work for them, instead of just working at their computer, and removes the possibility that any more will arise - no-one will voluntarily seek the rights they need to approve of their own software, because they'll be singled out as potential hackers and troublemakers, and any data breaches that do occur will be attributed to them.

As applied within our organization, it's also soul-crushingly annoying to programmers. We'll have the rights to approve of any software we want to run, but we have to click through an approval dialog for each... new..... file... which of course, means that every time we rebuild our code we face a clickfest just to debug it, or run unit tests on it, etc.... most of us have shied away from being "upgraded" to Windows 7 because of this. Several of us just wish we could change to Linux, being Java programmers.

Indeed, many of our internal teams are also getting the self-approval rights, which just trains them to click "Approve" and you're all the way back to UAC again, no extra security, just extra hassle, reduced performance of the computer (which is now hashing every file you access on the drive to see if it's on the whitelist), and more money diverted into the coffers of the kind of company that sponsored this story in the first place.

Sidebars are a much better idea on a widescreen anyway ; the ribbon just takes up valuable vertical space that's at a premium since people stopped making LCD panels for computer users.

Yeah, for me the problem is getting that date count up.

I've so far been online dating for about 9 months, I've dated only 6 women. Of these :

* The first one entered into a relationship with me that lasted a couple of months, during which I didn't bother with dating sites for obvious reasons
* The most recent is promising, but we've only been on one date, and because of distance and logistics, the next date is proving hard to organise

I'm on two subscription dating sites (one is match.com) and two free ones (Plenty of Fish and OKCupid). Of these, I've had two dates from OKCupid, two from POF, one from Match and one from the other subscription site, so on this tiny sample the free sites work better than the paid ones... although they all barely work at all.

I estimate I've probably messaged around 120 women, being picky*, sending proper tailored messages that actually respond to things in their profile, mostly concentrated in POF, OKC, and Match. (the last site is an odd one that only lets you browse a certain number of women per day that it picks out for you, and most of the profiles on there are very poor because their sign-up process numbs the brain). When I actually get a response, I think my "date rate" is around 50%

In contrast, I went speed dating and out of a pool of 13 women I got two "mutual matches" and 5 / 13 expressed an interest in dating me. Clearly something is wrong with the way I express myself online. I've had women turn me down on the grounds that I was "too intellectual for them"... I'm not sure if this is a reflection on me, or the dating pool concerned (POF and Match.com seem to be more "everyman" than OKCupid which is definitely more artsy, professional, and intelligent in tone).

The main surprise for me so far has been how many vegetarians OKCupid matches me up with....

* defined as only messaging women that I actually find attractive

Hell, yes, on the insurance. I can't comprehend it - I've had pretty much the same premium since I qualified (at the age of 24), so it's been dropping in real terms about in line with inflation. But the kids these days are facing premiums of 10 x as much. I just went to a boardgaming meetup and had this confirmed to me by most of the younger attendees.

You could don a tinfoil hat and say that someone wants to restrict their mobility.

You're running into one of the properties of BitCoin here - it's not anonymous, it's pseudonymous. You can't hide the transaction history of a given coin, because that's how BitCoin works - it's a single vast verifiable public transaction log. If someone doesn't want to accept coins that passed through a particular wallet, then it's easy to verify this. And if there are enough people who won't touch Silk Road coins, then their value will be dubious to the people who ordinarily would.

It's impossible to "launder" BitCoin for this reason - you can always trace the entire transaction history for a given coin or subdivisions thereof.

That said, I think it's unlikely that people will turn them down.

The visuals in Hackers were completely unrealistic - but they avoided the ire of programmers, and the inevitable dating of their film, by instead mostly going for a kind of interpretive mindscape video, instead of attempting to realistically represent the process of hacking.

I like to think that someone in production design actually went out and researched what hacking looked like.. and instead decided to talk to people about what hacking FELT like.

Exactly.

There has been a long campaign to convince people that you shouldn't sell them on.

Why? Because they are virtually indestructible. There must be enough diamond jewellery out there for everyone by now....