How do you short bitcoin? There are market options for shorting stocks (via contracts I think) and for traditional currency I'm not so sure, but I'd guess similar vehicles are available. Is there a way to short bitcoins?

Lost in the operator game.. The original article talks about *drives* D through I on a Windows machine. Some idiot (appears to be Michael Mimoso) decided that "partition" is a more pro-sounding synonym for "drive" and started using both interchangeably in the article from OP. So we are all left scratching our heads. The point I think is that the thing tries to destroy data on network and attached storage devices, rather than wiping C drive which would give itself away much more quickly..

That's pretty silly. It's true that MS locked in a juicy piece of revenue when it retained ownership of IBM's OS for the original PC. But I don't think a serious argument can be made that all the subsequent successes stem from that one line of revenue or IP. The transition to Windows was based on the Mac's success not the IBM PC. The work with IBM on OS/2 and converted to Win NT was not premised on that DOS license. Office, MS SQL and just keep counting their market successes from there.

I'm not make an arguement about DRM inherently at the moment, but I use the B&N NookBook products. I can read the books any of a number devices. I read on a PC, my Transformer tablet, my B&N e-ink reader and on my Android phone (I'm certain it works on a mac and iphone/pad as well). So while the format is not open (aka w/out DRM) they definitely give you the ability to read the book on a variety of h/w platforms.

You can also side-load books into a device and I believe that works for DRM content so long as you have the inherent DRM access rights associated with that content. So I can copy my DRM'ed epubs right off my e-reader and back them up. Then I can copy then back later and they will work with my account still.

Granted when B&N goes out of business, etc, there may be some problems (not sure how their DRM is operated and whether it needs to check-in with a home base periodically to keep my DRM books open). I've had my device disconnected from the internet for a month with no problems but who knows.

Huh - interesting point. I would have a thought a few exploding bolts would do the job, not a fiery end but would end up with a drone in lots of pieces, instead of a whole stealth drone in the hands of Iran.. Which seems like something they don't want.

That airframe was stealthy apparently so I'd guess it's pretty valuable. Note the seals tried to destroy the airframe of their stealthy (and up to that point unknown) helicopter on the Bin Laden raid, partially successfully.

If it were this easy, CIA and .mil wouldn't air gap so many networks. Even so they are vulnerable to hacking.

Also, it seems like the drone that crash landed is Iran had self-destruct mechanisms which didn't work. I'm not saying Iran's claim to have hacked the drone is very credible, but even so, they should have collected a bunch of burned wreckage, not a largely intact, high value, stealth drone.

Third, remember that for a long time (and maybe even to this day) drone camera footage is beamed down from satellites to the drone operators in the US on *unencrypted channels.* The military is frequently lagging industry on digital security issues.

Not to go totally academic here but that's a structuralist viewpoint, in my opinion. And structuralists are pretty cool - not a bad viewpoint at all. Personally, I really love the work of folks like Ian Hodder who has been looking at things from a (his term) post-processualist viewpoint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hodder). This implies that normal is often an artifact of analysis, not a feature of culture. There are whole books on this, so hard to summarize, but perceived cultural boundaries are most commonly actually gradations of different attributes of humanity, and historians and anthropologists often draw these arbitrary lines around clusters of these attributes and call it "normal" (aka "normal American"). That often isn't how the emic (internal to culture) folks view it at all..

Example, I feel generally more culturally connected to people from Vancouver than people from Maine, even though being a Californian, my country is often viewed as my cultural anchor from the etic (outsider) perspective.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying there are other ways to look at this, than "normal" being the definer or creator of culture.

I think maybe you think I was not using irony.

OP was complaining that Java has too many training wheels, and it doesn't teach key programming practices. I was using irony to point out, by time honored car analogy, that sometimes training wheels are in fact real innovations that are just plain better than the old way. Sounds like you agree.

From an anthropological perspective, cannibalism is no worse than carpet bombing Cambodia, or dropping drone missiles into wedding parties right?

Nevertheless, the concept of "normal" is cultural, which was my point, and it sounds like you agree? And specifically, marriage as a concept is culturally defined, and not universally the same.

I lived on several Polynesian islands and homosexuals there were totally unremarked upon. The gay men (I didn't meet any lesbians, as society there is pretty heavily stratified with men spending time with men, and I'm a man) had basically equal status with the other men, and no one seemed to care if you were screwing men or women at night. They also didn't have a formal marriage system like the Catholic priests who were on one island wanted, and in fact the priests finally got a whole bunch of couples to get married in the church, while I was there (some of the couples had been together for 40+ years). Of course only the hetero couples got married in this Western way, which maybe was the start of a segregating of gay couples in the culture. I haven't been back in a long time so maybe the priests are winning that one now, but I can say that I've personally witnessed cultures that don't give a crap about "marriage is just between one man and one woman."

And this doesn't even start on your notion of family: families in polynesia where I lived are very much more fluid than here. People pass kids around between *households* somewhat frequently based on whether someone has too many or too few kids to take care of, and there is no concept of "adopted" as a stigma -- children define their parents, whether blood or otherwise, as the ones who are feeding them. There is a word for "blood parent" but it's almost never used and is insignificant culturally/emotionally to the children I talked with.

Yeah totally!! I hate that my car shifts automatically, has power locks, power steering, digital tuning on the radio and anti-lock brakes. And that freaking airbag is totally annoying, waiting to go off at ANY time. Get me back to my old 61 ford falcon with a metal steering wheel and no synchros on the gear box. Those were the days when real men drove real cars.

Yeah or a 100 line Rails app..

Forget that the Rails framework still carries a very high bug load - but your 100 lines can be virtually bug free!

In fact, GPL v2 does make mention of making a living unrelated to "free as in speech": "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy" (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html paragraph 1).

Also it appears that GPL (at least) does not prevent someone from wrapping an installer around an installer and distributing that: "In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License." Notably this indicates that the wrapping installer (nor the toolbars or whatever inside it) do not become GPL'ed itself either (which would be a significant disincentive to the behavior).

IANAL

Yeah - that's a good point. Damien specifically modeled Couch off of the good parts of Lotus Notes distribution (remember when IBM kept saying Lotus notes isn't really an email product - it just does email as a side effect? I now know why they were saying that). That said, it would be hard for my project to choose closed-licensed COTS when an OSS alternative like couch exists. Recognizing Lotus is almost certainly many times more robust and better engineered than couch for all these purposes. Thanks for pointing this option out.