I'm afraid I do understand it. The whole point of the "merchant services" apps are to allow the merchants to handle payment in Bitcoin. I'm staring right at 20 or so "merchant services" for precisely such use at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How....

Many of the apps seem to be horrible, and send far too much information to central money exchanges, many including online wallet systems, which should not be trusted. The overlap of such tools with online wallets is as unsurprising as in-store credit cards, and I'm afraid that due to their novelty and lack of regulatory awareness many are quite flawed if not outright corrupt.

> Colorblindness is a form of diversity. You don't hate diversity, do you?

This is only slightly funny. I've some colleagues with deaf children who came under enormous social pressure for getting cochlear implants for their children. It's described well at:

                          http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...

The "merchant services" have turned out to be very difficult to manage without an online wallet, so I'm afraid they've blurred the "distinction" themselves.

> There has been for years the understanding that IF a difference should arise between the nearby events that we can study well, and the distant events which appear dimly and vaguely, AND if we did not realize that such a difference existed, THEN we could reach incorrect conclusions.

Thank you for being so clear. I hope that your colleagues appreciate the rigor of your thinking.

I've actually become suspicious, as an educated layman, about the other underlying assumptions that may confuse our cosmological models. For example, as we look more closely at nearby stars, we're finding more and more planets and cold, intrastellar bodies that would be very, very difficuclt to observe because they're barely above the temperature of interstellar space, and not close enough to stars to reflect easily noticed light. So it raises a very interesting question of "how much matter is in a star's Ooort cloud", and "how much matter is in interstellar or intragalactic space? If a significant amount condensed into small solid bodies earlier in the history of the universe, they'd be quite difficult to take into effect or even notice except as gravitational effects affecting the overall mass of the universe and Big Bang expansion.

I'm beginning, personally, to suspect it as a mudane source of the "Dark Matter" which is showing up in our larger models of the universe. Have you seen anyone exploring the idea?

> They simply contract with a 3rd party bitcoin exchange that provides a payment address to the user

And that is where the risk enters. Many of them have already proven untrustworthy.

                http://www.forbes.com/sites/an...

                http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoi...

                http://insidebitcoins.com/news...

It's very difficult to evaluate trustworthy Bitcoin exchanges in such a shortlived market, and the faud rate seems to be quite high.

I'm not sure if you thought about it, but "square of the distance between the objects" only applies to single masses, "point sources" in ordinary Newtonian mathematics. When you look at a spiral shaped galaxy full of stars, and you're measuring the _net_ effects of gravitation and the relative potential energy differences among them and the net forces acting as one enters the actual accretion disk of matter surrounding its core, it can be confusing. Whether it is a black hole isn't the issue, the effect I refer to exists whether or not the core is a black hole or a simple mass of starts. In effect, the accretion disk can lessen the gravitational effects of the core, especially tidal effects if the accretion disk is dense. It's an old calculus problem to understand that, inside a torus, the gravitational effect is to pull one towards the side of the torus unless one is _exactly_ in the center.

You're being disingenuous. Much of the control of private firearms involves the _sale_ or transport of the weapons. Few home workshops, and few home gun smiths, can make a reliable extended magazine or rile action from scratch, they'd require extensive training in precision machining. But now people like Cody Wilson are publishing designs to make exactly such mechanisms for AR-15 equivalent assault rifles ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )

> You are once again speaking incorrectly. I suspect that you have not read Richard Stallman's "GNU Manifesto". I'll summarize it for you without the rationalizations and justifications: "I hate copyright. So I have written the GPL to fuck over copyright *using* copyright.";

No, I'm afraid that _you_ are speaking incorrectly. Don't paraphrase it, there's no need. It's at https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manife.... In particular, read the Review the paragraphse surrounding this statement:

        > The copyright system was created expressly for the purpose of encouraging authorship. In the domain for which it was invented—books, which could be copied economically only on a printing press—it did little harm, and did not obstruct most of the individuals who read the books.

That manifesto is not a "all information should be free!" or an "I hate copyright" document. It's a well reasoned analysis of the purposes and benefits versus the costs, of copyright restrictions for software.

> Your theory that one employee or one team screwed up might fit if this were just a case of a single customer requesting the source

There is another potential source of the problem. One of the most difficult situations I've encountered is when developers build software, including kernels, on their own workstations with their own source code and never submit their changes to the corporate source control. I've especially encountered this when the code is heavily customized with "optimizations" that do not match the normal distribution, especially with kernels that do not build modules that the developers has decided they do not need and statically loaded the ones they do want. It's been a screaming nightmare to get these developers to share their work and get their changes in source code, partly because on code review it turns out to be _horrible_. One of my worst such experiences involved a highly paid developer cutting and pasting public patches they did not understand and did not test into the kernel, taking credit for the "improvements" they did not write and which were only detectible in contrived and unrealistic performance tests, and breaking entire deployments by including broken old code from their private source branches, which were impossible to merge due to unnecessary rewrites and re-organizations of upstream code.

The chaos in production use was predictable. Features which were included, and tested, in the standard kernel were left out of the "tuned" kernel, for which there is no reference code available to anyone else, and debugging its failures is a QA and systems debugging nightmare. It's part of the reason to build the code only on a well defined build environment, and only build from a defined source control repository that is checked out with every build.

This does not apply to cable companies, which have substantial from cable subscribes, or to countries with television taxes. The UK calls their television tax a "license fee", but it's a tax.

> Further all 3 branches will be using the F-35x as a strike aircraft,

I'm afraid they won't, not as budgets develop over the next 2 decades That was the original plan, and it's pretty clearly failed.

Since the F-35 is too big as a multi-purpose design, eats too much fuel, and has too hot an exhaust at takeoff, it can't be used effectively on carriers. It's not agile and the field of view make it useless for dogfighting, so it's entirely reliant on the "stealth" technology to avoid enemy aircraft or missiles. The stealth technology has never worked except in simulation because of its size and heat signature. It eats far, far too much fuel, so its effective bombing range is quite limited. The overpowered short-takeoff single engine design keeps failing because of excess stress, so the only way to use the aircraft consistently is with low speed, short range "stealth" runs. Its "low altitude stealth bombing" capability is ineffective and inefficient compared to cruise missile or drones for the short range attacks which are the only remaining use for this craft, since both cost far less and have better stealth capability: you simply cannot fly that large an aircraft as close to the ground as a drone or cruise missile.

The anticipated, and constantly rising, cost of the F-35 aircraft is approximately $300 million each for the expected 32 aircraft of the _testing_ manufacturing run. The attempt to use the same airframe with different versions for all three military branches and their very different needs has made it so expensive that it's next to useless and many times the cost of a normal aircraft for _any_ of the planned roles. It has incredibly expensive "stealth" technology that does not work, it's incredibly fast but it cannot turn in air combat, and it's so overmuscled and heavy that the $1500/each tires keep failing when it lands.

> The amount of energy people are putting into the ground compared to the scale of the forces

The "amount of energy" is already present, it's not the addition of energy. The problem is that the water being pumped in is acting as a lubricant, in ways that oil embedded shale is not so good a lubricant. The earthquakes are due to _release_ of energy, not addition of energy.

And completely justified. I see it every day month, at least, in the database and web utility worlds with people who heavily modify their internal forks and provide _no_ access to those changes to anyone else.

There were technical reasons, as well as political reasons. It's attempting to replace half a dozen working individual tools, such as NTP daemons, logging daemons, and DHCP, with its own unified master toolkit. It's also attempting to get rid of "/etc". Leonard Pottering has stated so, publicly.