The financial regulations that primarily apply to exchanges and trading platforms aren't what you think they are. As far as I'm aware, at least, there are no regulations that require "competence", perhaps because it's so company-specific and difficult to legislate. The regulations that DO apply are primarily about allowing governments to track money flows between identified parties for the purposes of crime fighting and who knows, maybe some general oppression as well ;)

It's nice to think that regulators can solve these kinds of problems. Experience of the last few years suggests that it's a much harder thing to solve than you believe. For instance, you say 17 year olds shouldn't be allowed to handle other peoples money. So, when he turns 18 he magically becomes competent then? Regulating ownership like this is very hard. In the UK there is a requirement that owners of major media and financial organizations are "fit and proper". This requirement is now causing the Tories to tie themselves in knots trying to explain how Murdoch and News Corp are "fit and proper" despite being at the center of a complex case of hacking and political corruption. It ends up being more about politics and backscratching than any real clear definition of who is competent or not.

This is what happens when you deal with an unregulated currency supply.

Regulation of currency has nothing to do with this. In fact shortly before it closed Bitcoinica was boasting that it had recently come under regulatory supervision. And do you think dollars and euros are immune from incompetence leading to massive losses? If so, where have you been in the last few years?

The underlying problem here is simple, and actually has little to do with Bitcoin itself. The problem is that Bitcoin has grown so extremely fast that almost anyone who sets up a unique financial service, as Bitcoinica and MtGox did, is immediately flooded with users and vast sums of money. These guys are then plunged into the pain of scaling up their operations from zero almost overnight .... setting up customer support, dealing with bugs and new features, figuring out the relevant regulations so they can start to comply with them and attempting to secure their operations.

It does not help that many of these operations started out being run by rank amateurs. MtGox was written in amateurish PHP and had to be almost completely rewritten from scratch by Mark Karpeles, who appears to be fairly competent. Their big security breach came when the previous owner (the amateur) got hacked, he had retained too much access to the business internals. Bitcoinica was, notoriously, set up by a Chinese 17 year old who was able to build a nice UI and working trading platform, but quickly realized he was in over his head with regards to building a rock solid secure operation.

Securing IT systems is hard and Bitcoin as it stands today doesn't do much to help you with it. It's worth noting here that if you just want to sell things for coins (the common merchant case) your server does not need to have the ability to spend the received money at all. You can use a split wallet (also called a "watching wallet") on the server, and then only a totally diffferent secure machine of your choosing can actually move the money. So the difficulty mostly affects companies that need to automatically receive and send large sums of money. The community knows how to make improvements - the protocol allows for money to require multiple signatures to move it, so a framework for having an independent second system that verifies/risk-analyses a transaction stream before signing it would be a good step forward. Using trusted computing platforms like Intel TXT + the TPM chip allows you to secure your wallet in such a way that root level compromise of the machine cannot be used to extract the keys. And the use of "cold storage" wallets is already commonplace. Etc, etc.

The Bitcoin world is going through a period of rapid evolution in which amateur wildcat operations prove demand and are then rapidly replaced by companies designed by highly paranoid people. If you are skilled at computer security and willing to do a lot of paperwork, there's golden opportunities for you right now.

Well, there's certainly some truth to that, but you're assuming that there is a free market at work here. That isn't the case. Markets require property rights - if I can pay you or not pay you for something depending on, basically, whether I give a crap or not, what you have is not a market in the capitalist sense. That is what has happened to music and is happening to other types of creative works due to the failure of the tech industry to implement strong DRM, or to stop file sharing networks. There is no market any more. Only beggars and charitable individuals.

That's not a large exemption any more because the dollar has been sliding in value for a long time now. It's less than the average salary for software engineers in Switzerland, for instance, and that's with an aggressive currency peg to the Euro. If that peg wasn't in place or was weaker, it'd probably start including all kinds of non-professions, just due to exchange rate disparity.

Not really. Just forbid the government from spying on everyone with cameras in public places for any reason. The government doing it and individuals doing it are quite different things, as individuals aren't everywhere at once like the government's cameras.

Perhaps my original post was not clear enough, or you did not read it. There are very few "government cameras". There are a lot of cameras put in places by the owners/operators of that place. Eg at railway stations it's the station operators who pay for, install and operate the cameras with the police having no special or unusual access beyond what is allowed via law. Therefore the UK government is already unable to "spy on everyone with government cameras" because there is no legal or technical mechanism for them to do that.

I don't see your point. For there to be a surveillance state, there'd have to be some capability to follow a specific person around across all these cameras, and as already pointed out, that capability does not exist. It's the modern equivalent of having security guards on patrol. Useful for security, not so useful as a method for the state to persecute annoying individuals.

If you aren't concerned about that specific capability of the state then you're making a more general argument which is very different, namely that you want some abstract notion of privacy in public places - moreover, public places that are highly trafficked and historically have been targeted by organizations like the IRA. That more abstract notion of privacy is significantly harder to guarantee (individuals would be unable to take photos or film in public places), so most countries draw the line after "the state can spy on anyone with impunity" but before "videoing people in public places is forbidden".

The idea that the UK is some kind of surveillance state is a myth propagated on Slashdot by people who don't know better. If I recall correctly the "highest density of CCTV" meme comes from an article in the Daily Mail (aka Daily Fail). They counted all CCTV cameras, including all private cameras, in one very small and specific part of London. Despite the fact that these cameras are subject to the data protection act and typically not even connected to a communications network, they then extrapolated that small area of London to the entirety of the UK and asserted everyone was "being watched all the time", which is about as accurate as saying your email is always being read (by automatic spam filters).

Internet censorship proposals keep getting floated every few years by "save the children" types in the UK, whereas the idea is taboo in the USA. That's good for America. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean there's no censorship in the states. US residents and citizens are subject to a comprehensive and effective system of financial censorship instead. For example, when politicians there decided that internet poker was bad, they decided to censor online poker sites. Rather than do it via DNS or IP blocking they commanded banks and payment processors to block financial transaction to those sites instead. The effect was the same - Americans cannot use these sites.

The financial censorship system operates the same as you would expect from an online censorship system. There is a large blocklist of questionable accuracy - it includes companies and people who do not exist and performs matching by name only. There is no right to appeal and no evidence is required to be added to the list. It is subject to political manipulation as we saw with the WikiLeaks blockade. It requires pervasive monitoring, implemented via government access to banks financial records. Foreign financial transfers are also available to the US government via the "Terrorist Finance Tracking Program", which basically dumps every wire transfer, credit card transaction etc into a giant database that is queried hundreds of times per day - essentially the equivalent of deep packet inspection.

Of course, like any form of censorship, ways around the system are also censored. Whilst attempting to evade online censorship is typically not treated as a serious crime even in places like China, attempting to evade US financial blocklists is considered to be money laundering and can result in imprisonment for up to 20 years. In fact, being used by third parties as a way to evade this type of censorship is also money laundering even if you're simply an unaware middleman! The original formulation of these laws had a "mens rea" requirement, ie, to be guilty you had to actually intend to break the law and have a guilty mind. Virtually all money laundering cases fell because of this, so Congress simply removed the requirement.

Finally, because censorship systems have to be global to be truly effective, the USA has been persistently "harmonizing" this system onto the rest of the world since its inception. It gets tiresome to read posts from Americans trashing the UK for being some kind of censorship crazy surveillance state when the depressing reality is the reverse.

I'm not going to give you a yes or no, because I don't have to. This is Slashdot, not a grand jury. And, because the answer is more nuanced.

Although Steve is gone, Apple is continuing everything that both Richard and I didn't like about their business. So, Steve's malign influence on people's computing continues unabated.

Like I said, I could have written it better than Richard, because Richard has problems with empathy. Had I written it, it would have been more graceful.

Steve also had no shortage of head problems. What an idiot for not retiring when he was first diagnosed - but I guess the public Steve Jobs was the only Steve Jobs there was, and he couldn't stop. Besides his foolish continuance of work, an eating disorder contributed to his demise. He did end up becoming the richest guy in the graveyard.

Why do you claim it is "unsafe"? Almost all work done in Objective-C is very "safe", by any measure

Objective C, at least as used on iOS, is not a safe language. I don't see how anyone with serious programming experience could believe that.

Here are some things about it that are unsafe. Firstly, it's not garbage collected (on the phone). Manual memory management has a long history of resulting in memory corruptions, leaks, and even security vulnerabilities. Yes, on MacOS X there is GC available, so Apple clearly recognize this. They appear to believe that it's not OK on a phone.

Secondly, and this is just crazy to my mind, dereferencing a null pointer (ok, rephrase it in terms of sending messages to nil if you like) ..... does not terminate the application. It's actually a "defined" operation in the sense that it's defined to return garbage or another nil. Sending a message to nil has no useful purpose so it is guaranteed to reflect a bug in your application, unless (worse) you have some "clever" programmer who decided to rely on this obscure behavior. The nonsense of accessing NULL is why it is defined to result in an application crash on any sane platform - you want to stop the app at that point to avoid possible data corruption. But Objective C apps will happily continue their merry way, overwriting internal state with garbage or more nils until it auto-saves your now hopelessly corrupted data to disk.

This is a specific instance of a more general problem with Objective-C, which is that despite being based on C it turns a lot of failures that would be compile failures in any modern language into runtime failures or heuristically driven compiler warnings. Most research into programming languages for the last 10-15 years has been about how to catch more errors earlier, mostly through better type systems (a lot of functional research is in this direction). Objective-C takes a massive step backwards in this regard, converting errors even C++ compilers can catch ahead of time into issues you may not even notice unless you have extremely thorough testing plans. Example: typos in method names.

Thirdly, Objective-C does not have any kind of real namespacing support. The Cocoa libraries use the convention of an API prefix, but there's no language support for it, meaning "namespaces" such as they are tend to be very short or non-existant. Combined with the way symbols can mishmash together in the same binary can lead to awkward to solve linking issues.

There are a lot of problems with Objective-C that make it difficult to consistently write correct code and flatly contradict how modern languages are designed (no surprise, as it's not modern).

I was also offended by the New Yorker cover, and I think Richard was too.

Nobody should be surprised that there was much that is negative about Steve. I do oppose Apple's way of business, which is high on DRM and control of the user. Were I writing the same piece, I think I could have said it better than Richard.

I think the saddest part is that Dennis Ritchie, who really invented the stuff of our modern world, died around the same time and in comparison to Steve, was unlamented.