I see what you did there . . .

And as usual, people who trust their Crypto Currency to a web based service (especially one with such a short history to it, and no clearly defined security practices) end up getting their shit stolen. Really now, if you want your crypto coins (be they BTC LTC or whatever) safe keep them in a private wallet and encrypt it, don't load your fortunes onto some website, then complain when they get hacked.

This is kind of like carrying around a giant wad of cash in your pocket and then being mad when someone mugs you, keep a small amount of 'working cash' readily available, and keep the rest of it in a safe place. The same logic that you'd use with real money should apply to virtual money.

Java was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment, I realize java itself is not a bad thing. It's just that 90% of the computers that have java installed on them, really don't need to have java installed on them, and don't really benefit from having it installed. 95% of the web works just fine now a days without Java or Flash or anything but the native browser functionality, and arguably the other 5% is mostly websites I'd recommend people stay away from anyways. Having additional runtimes like Java and Flash execute from the browser opens up all sorts of security vulnerabilities that shouldn't exist. The fact that Oracle seems hell bent on including the 'ask toolbar' with Java is just icing on the cake. I tell people all the time, that unless you've got a very specific reason to need Java installed on a machine, you're better off without it.

Potentially Unwanted Programs are not quite malware, though in many cases I'd argue are worse. PUPs are generally stuff like 'WOMG Awesome Toolbar', 'Internet Coupon Printer 3000', "Free smilies wacky mouse pointers' and Java.

They're legitimate in the sense that they won't exploit vulnerabilities in your system to install themselves, or (generally) ignore (or interfere with) attempts to remove them from your computer. They might even propose to have some sort of functionality that a user could want. The reality is that the functionality they generally offer is limited at best, and may even be inferior to the native functionality of the computer. They often slow your machine down, eating up your CPU cycles, opening up your computer to additional vulnerabilities, stealing your personal information to sell to advertisers, and generally speaking are not really useful to or needed by the people who have them installed on their computers.

I disagree. Having worked in everything from multinational companies to 3 man start-up companies I think I've seen quite a bit of the dev world.

I think a well balanced team usually consists of older and younger developers myself.

What you want to avoid as a manager is encouraging cliques and age-based group stratums. Socially people will naturally tend to separate by age somewhat, but by spreading your experienced devs in with the less experienced you create new niches and groups that center around productive aspects such as projects, platforms, and responsibilities.

A few tricks I've used is allow developers to volunteer for project milestones. This gives you good cross-communication setup between project and age groups and allows devs to find their fit if you structure your projects right.

Another trick is to encourage creativity and social rewards. Having code meetings where the entire crowd gets to work through some code together. Each meeting, a different person or team brings part of their project to present and explain their design choices and algorithms for the rest of the team. The team gets to learn a bit, and also can positively (or occasionally negatively) critique the code and look for problems. This can work across projects and departments as well.

You need to encourage social activities across groups as well, but be careful not to cut into outside time too much. Older devs generally have lives outside of work. So limit your after-work socializing and instead encourage innovative activities with 15 minute coffee breaks together or an after-meeting walk.

If you're having problems motivating older developers then it's quite likely that you're not building, managing and deploying your experience properly. You need to do more than toss them in a cube with a set of project milestones. Younger people will do better in that environment if only because they will have more time to sacrifice.

Older people have already done their "lone wolf" time, and generally expect better management and organization. They expect resources to get the job done efficiently and want to be learning and mentoring, not just chugging out LOC. Most of them won't complain as devs tend to be introverts for the most part. If you want productive feedback then you need to empower groups with responsibilities beyond milestones. They need to have time to evaluate and analyze. They need to have time to go over designs and understand, give input, and have their input rewarded.

The secret is to create balanced work environments that allow your workers to be both productive and growing. Having static organizational structures that boxes devs into platforms and languages for years creates experience lags and power bubbles. Having work/slave relationships creates revolving doors. Having loose organizations creates deadline creep and project failure.

In the end, there are plenty of organizations successfully employing developers into retirement age. What you want is an organization that manages goals and expectations by delegating work to teams that are organized with mixed experience and socially rewarded for meeting deadlines. Management should be open to criticism and giving out criticism when necessary. Teams should as well.

Lastly, realize that most developers aren't strictly motivated by dollars. Most people are far more motivated to work towards a goal when the reward is linked with their goals and creativity. Developers need to have the room to try things and fail at them, refine and build on those experiences. If you build that into your development process then you will reduce product and project failures enormously.

Anyway, just my ramblings...

Imagine for a moment that a government decided they were going to go and take half of their fiat currency in existence out of the economy, this wouldn't actually mean that there was now less value worth of money in the economy, only that the individual currency denominations are individually worth twice as much as they used to be.

If an entity with the financial capability to buy $4.8 billion worth of BTC went on that much of a buying spree the price of individual BTC would skyrocket, as the demand for the product would rise while the entity was purchasing them. Then, presumably since the goal of this entity is to destroy BTC, they would not reintroduce the coins they'd purchased back into the economy, thus causing a decrease in supply, that would have the ultimate result of simply stabilizing the remaining BTC at their new higher value.

There are sites which offer interest (paid as a % of the exchange's revenue as a way to attract new members). As well as places that offer investments/loans.

While I agree that the best way to safeguard your BTC is with an encrypted private wallet, there are valid reasons to consider storing them online. Granted you should certainly do your research first, and even if everything is on the up and up, accept that there is some risk involved if the site owner turns out to be a sleaze, or doesn't properly secure his servers against hackers etc. If you're adverse to that kind of risk then keep it in your private wallet.

Well, I LOL'ed... but alas no modpoints.

I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but I will respond to the first point. Adding -San to a name is somewhat similar to saying Mr. but Japanese honorifics tend to be slightly more nuanced than the Mr, and Mrs, style honorifics of English. In japan it's considered very impolite to refer to someone by their given name rather than family name, unless you are very close friends. Likewise it is considered impolite in Japanese to leave off any honorific again unless you are very close friends.

Generally adding -san to a name indicates that the person is someone you do not have a close relationship with, and denotes a respectful tone. Other honorifics commonly used in modern japan include -sama, which would be given to someone you strongly look up to or who is highly above your social station, it's roughly the equivalent of calling someone 'boss' but again is more nuanced and respectful than that, -kun is generally used to refer to someone who is below your social station while still being respectful, it's common that in a work environment for a supervisor to speak to a (generally male) junior with -kun, while the junior would refer to their supervisor with -san, while the president of the company would be -sama. -chan is the last commonly used honorific, and is generally used in similar situations where -kun would be used for females, it's also used to indicate 'cuteness' or for small children. A mascot character might be referred to as Mascot-chan if they're supposed to be cute or childish, and it is common for adults to refer to elementary grade or younger children with -chan.

There's more nuances to Japanese honorifics than I give here, but that's the long and short of it, if you're ever in doubt which honorific would be appropriate to a given situation, generally going with -san is a safe fall back.

I think the article is complete bollocks, but simple basic DSP isn't that difficult if you use a simple codec. Hell, even a morse code type system with basic CRC checking wouldn't take more than 16k. It doesn't have to deal with echo (high frequency is rather directional), it doesn't have to deal with doppler (few moving objects), and it's obviously a secondary communications channel.

The thing that gives it away for me is that something could embed so deeply without being detected, as USB and networks are heavily scanned these days.

I have written plenty of kernel code, bios code and the like. The effort to get such perfect code running without causing crashes or being detected on the network would be enormous. If it's at all possible, it would certainly require government level funding.

I'm not saying it isn't possible - but it's just very, very unlikely.

Tell you what, if 12 Mil is measly to you, then I'm sure you wouldn't even notice if half a mil went missing. And I sure could use half a million dollars . . .

I don't think all advertisers are inherently malicious. There are some sure, but then there are some crooked cops, some sleazy salesmen, corrupt politicians etc. The problem comes in that most of the time we see advertisements on the internet its because there really is no other way for the company to provide the services they provide unless someone is footing the bill. Would you use Google search if you had to pay for it? Some people might, but I'd be willing to bet that most people wouldn't. Using AD blockers is the digital equivalent of saying "I want to use your service but I don't think it's good enough to to pay for it".

Now I might sound a little hypocritical, since I do have an ad blocker installed myself, but when I regularly visit a website that I know makes it's money off of ads I'll usually disable it. And I have been known to spring for 'premium' accounts occasionally (which usually ditch the ads) for services I use a lot, so maybe I am a bit of a hypocrite for not wanting to pay for the hosting of 'Joe and Jim's Spam blog' that I happened to visit once when just surfing around the net, but for sites that I visit Daily, I usually have no problem with a couple tasteful ads that don't significantly detract from the content of the page.