No, those are something else entirely. The crimes happen when government agencies exceed their mandate or the limits of the Constitution. Of course, that puts the NSA firmly on the wrong side of the law here. I'm just waiting for the announcement that they are merging with the RBN. If they were at all honest, they would have struck the colors and hoisted the Jolly Roger by now.

So the younger coders are willing to risk a few of their early years in the hopes of a big stock win or buy-out.

Where's the problem?

If there are other systems that need programmers then hire programmers for those other systems. There are programmers who do not fit the "just out of school" demographic. Why not hire those programmers? Why focus on the "young" coders?

They must get to you somehow. Widespread use of criptocurrencies mean that with social engineering, fake/trojaned apps or even using nsa backdoors your wallet is exposed for all the world. Social engineering is a powerful tool with bitcoin stealing trojans. Things are not so easy with bank accounts, even with all the problems they have, and of course, not with cash.

Cryptocurrencies with no intermediaries can't become popular till we fix internet/personal devices security. If the intermediary is the government or banks then you are more or less in the same situation than with dollars, and if are thirdy party you will have the same problems that with bitcoin now, either they run/dissapear with your money or get hacked and stolen.

Even having nothing to hide, and guilty of nothing, you are still target to confirmation bias. And a private joke could put you in deep troubles.

Agreed 100%.

It is unfortunate that there is so much craptastic USB hardware out there. The sad part is how often it is decent(ish) hardware crippled by a terrible driver. Of course, it is sometimes crappy hardware papered over by the driver.

In a sense USB is a victim of it's own success. It was designed to allow for mass produced inexpensive interface chips. It allows for a lot of good and inexpensive hardware that just works, but it also allows for a lot of really cheap junk. Due to branding and market segmentation, it's hard to tell one from the other. The more expensive device might be better or it might just be over-priced. A lot of the no-name stuff is exactly the same as the premium branded stuff minus the expensive badge.

One thing USB did right was defining APIs for common device types. A surprising amount of USB hardware just works with the generic driver in Linux.

I wouldn't mind seeing an 'It just works' certification (optional, of course).

The difference, dumbass, is that he was already given a name by his parents.

These craters don't have a name, yet.

Wait, were you talking about the American government again?

Is there some Looser of the Week competition going on on here that I don't know about?

Yep. You won. Congratulations.

I was thinking along the same lines. If you have 20TB you should already have a NAS. So buy a second NAS and mirror it. Cost of a QNAP os about 1000 EUR and 8x4TB=1200EUR. So for 2200EUR you have 32TB available. Those including Belgian taxes and I have not even searched for prices. If you 'only' want 20TB and no way to grow, you are ready with 5x4TB + 5tray for 1550EUR. (all prices via alternate.be if you want to verify. Cheaper IS possible.)

Because the hardware (which Apple had nothing to do with) wasn't really there yet. However (as I mentioned elsewhere) a few ATMs actually did implement it back when Apple was considered an also ran. Before that, it was in about half of all sci-fi movies (where they didn't have to worry about the hardware). It was occasionally faked up mechanically by printing the option on the button. A static form of it even appeared with those crappy membrane keyboards.

That's not actually an uncommon situation. Some idea is all over the place but nobody implements it because the underlying tech is just not up to the task yet. Then someone takes a small evolutionary step with that underlying tech and suddenly the idea is reality. Then some asshole tries to claim it was all theirs.

Especially when you live in an area where everybody just lost their job. Southern West Virginia is depressed enough already without all of the coal mines shutting down at basically the same time.

That's because there were a bunch of other equally obvious mechanisms. The industry was essentially trying them all. They were mostly just GUI analogs of real world objects of various sorts. It just turned out that the slide to unlock caught on as a fashion. Fashion is not patentable.

It's funny when the financial press mistakes MtGOX (Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, lest we forget) for "Mt. Gox", like it was a mountain or something.

It's funny when pretentious Slashdot posters trot out some half-understood fact to sound important. Mt. Gox has gone by "Mt. Gox" for quite some time on mtgox.com, on Wikipedia, and on Bitcoin Charts -- as well as in common use in Bitcoin forums.