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.

We had to wait about three years to get the last doubling from 2TB to 4TB for commercially available internal disks. I seriously doubt we'll get *four* more doublings in the next four years.

The new x86-64 ABI with 32-bit pointers is cool because it allows you to get the architecture improvements of x86-64, such as extra registers and RIP-relative addressing, without increasing memory usage substantially due to larger data structures. Also, 64-bit operations will just use the 64-bit registers. The vast majority of programs simply do not need the extra address space.

One reason that this ABI works so well is that the majority of the x86-64 instruction set uses 32-bit operations. Some operations involving pointers can be done in one instruction without using a temporary register to load a 64-bit constant.

Windows actually also can support this, in theory, but you're on your own in trying to communicate with the Win32 API. The linker option /LARGEADRESSAWARE:NO causes the NT kernel to limit your program's address space to 2^31 bytes.

The thing is: the proportion of overweight & obese people in France is constantly growing, that is the "big problem", and even if other countries are worse this doesn't mean that ~40% is good: this is mostly caused by lifestyle..

> Most bread in the store has a metric buttload of sugars added simply because they can.

This is not true in all the countries: in France most breads don't contain sugar AFAIK, the main exception being pain de mie, yet there is also a big proportion of people with weight issues, not as big as in the USA, but still quite big..

>Not that it doesn't take hours of makeup and lighting and staging to photograph the beautiful person and the product

You forgot: "and photoshopping the result", nowadays computers are used even when the base material is photography.

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.