I think the person the questioner was talking to was a tad out of touch. And we see that regularly on Slashdot with people absolutely convinced that $TECHNOLOGY is never used because they don't see it used in their circle of technology acquaintances.

The four most commonly used platforms right now are LAMP with PHP (not Perl, not Python, Goddamnedfuckingawful PHP), JEE, .NET, and "front-end web (Javascript/HTML/DOM/CSS)". Coming up the rear are Objective C on iOS, Java on Android, and Native (non-.NET) C++ on Windows. Anyone who claims any of these seven (well, six and a half - Java on Android and JEE obviously share quite a bit, including an entire programming language) platforms are "legacy" are completely out of touch.

JEE and .NET are big in the corporate world and usually one or the other is the core platform for their modern web-based business software infrastructure, usually built as web applications (that is, servlets and .NET's equivalents serving HTML and Javascript for standard browsers, we're not talking not applets) accessing backends via web services.

LAMP is generally used for a lot of new projects that end up phenomenally successful but start as essentially hacks where someone wanted something and didn't know much about coding, but knew enough PHP to put something together that did what they needed.

Objective C on iOS and Java on Android are, obviously, the two major mobile platforms. And C++ is used on Windows because it's what was, until recently, the only standard Windows platform and a large number of Windows developers are still wary of .NET.

Even outside of the golden seven, we have languages like C that still serve a critical purpose in some domains such as kernel level systems software. And what remains is mostly a set of platforms that aren't "legacy", just not as popular. Python, Perl, node.js, Coldfusion (another platform I'd wish would die already, even more than PHP), Ruby, and others.

Legacy? I guess nobody's doing new COBOL development to the best of my knowledge, or new Fortran. Some would dearly like Adobe Flash to be legacy, but until a viable cross-platform DRM scheme gets added to HTML5, I don't see it going away.

But .NET? Claiming it's legacy shows astonishing ignorance.

Congratulations. You're the fourth (fifth, if we count hypothetical Nakamoto) person (maybe more, if we assume the moderators currently modding me back down also share the same misconception) who seems to have no understanding of how the Internet works and what the effect is has on privacy.

You are correct that logging, by itself, makes no difference. But logging is one of the key components of Bitcoin that destroys the ability to be genuinely anonymous on it. For more details, I suggest you read the response I made to the second of your sibling posts. But essentially, to re-iterate, the more you use a wallet, the more information "leaks" about you because the logging exists, is public, and will, from time to time, involve you making transactions with people who know you. Without the use of an extremely trustworthy Bitcoin laundering service, it will be the case that ultimately any well connected retailer or employer can find out what you've been spending your money on.

Comparing it to posting AC on Slashdot is inane and absurd. Indeed, even posting under a pseudonym on Slashdot, as I do, grants me more privacy than my attempting to use Bitcoin to buy both Samizdat and food.

I think both you and the sibling poster, quibblings about "pseudonymous" aside, both make the same mistake "Hypothetical Nakamoto" make, namely a failure to understand what privacy means when the Internet gets involved.

Transactions in Bitcoindom are logged, and effectively logged eternally (how easily this can scale is open to question, Bitcoin's advocates argue the blockchain can be truncated at some point, but it isn't right now and I suspect there's a lot of agreement that will have to go on to make that happen.) The logging is public - anyone can read it. From the Blockchain, you - and everyone else - can determine every single transaction that's affected a specific coin or a specific wallet. To actively isolate transactions from a wallet you'd have to do an enormous amount of work and receive help from a third party that's laundering transactions for so many people it's close to impossible to link them, and, of course, that third party would know what you're up to.

Does this mean you can tell that "squiggleslash" spent 0.1BTC on coke, hookers, and gambling last week? That depends. Without the laundering service, it's relatively easy to tell that someone who's your customer (or your employee...) did that. And as more and more information leaks from you about you and your wallet, more and more information becomes available as to what you're doing.

By comparison, whenever Google logs what you're doing, most people here are up in arms. But the funny thing is that Google doesn't publish logs of every single browser's history to the Internet. It keeps that information to itself. So for most of us, Google invading our privacy means a handful of Google employees might be able to do the research.

The Blockchain, however, is public.

The concept, as I understand it, is that at the moment in order to write a device driver for X11 you have to separately manage code that implements 2D and 3D graphic primitives. Given 2D operations are themselves a subset of 3D operations (even if the API doesn't reflect that), it makes sense to simply have device drivers implement the 3D parts. Then common wrapper code can implement the 2D, alleviating the driver developer of the burden of building and testing an entirely new block of code.

It should make X.org more reliable, as the same 2D code will be used for all drivers, and should end up being pretty solid. In the mean time, driver developers have more time to polish their 3D driver implementations. Win win. Maybe a slight performance hit, but probably not a significant one.

The original Bitcoin paper claims that the currency described by the protocol is "anonymous" ("Participants can be anonymous") yet it's a protocol where every transaction is logged. Can't get much less anonymous than that. So yeah, while it's unlikely this is the Mr Bitcoin Nakamoto, if it were the lack of understanding of personal privacy would fit in at all levels.

Friedman? Tom Friedman? Seriously?! Who the hell takes him seriously?

Good journalists exist, you choose to ignore them, but just look at, say, The Guardian's handling of Wikileaks to get some idea of how the concept hasn't gone away. Now, as always, we have the same mixture of good and bad as we've always had. Thompson and Murrow are not representative of their peers at the times they operated. And there exist journalists today who are the Thompsons and Murrows of today.

Well, I guess you can argue that Bitcoin is as "real" as witchcraft, but the problem with that is that right now a large number of people are actually trading with Bitcoins and as a result is has some trading value and is a real thing, no matter how stupid.

I'm a Bitcoin critic. I consider it a stupid idea that's based upon a naive view of money, and the recent problems that highlight the cons of being unregulated simply add fuel to the fire. But it's one thing to claim it's a bad idea, and another to claim it doesn't exist. People have enormous sums of money invested in the project. Nakamoto is in a privileged position to abuse that. He hasn't yet (to the best of my knowledge) so there's no reason to out him at this stage. But if he did...

Are you under the impression that in the last 2-300 years of journalism, Hunter S Thompson or Edward Murrow are representative of the vast majority of journalists?

Hell, even the supposedly famous "Did a great job on that one famous story" types are rarely as great as their reputations suggest. Look at Bob Woodward. Is he really the Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein, or a hack who reports any old crap to sell newspapers (and books)?

Technically Nakamoto has significant power, and as such it's arguable a case can be made that if he were to exploit that power (there's no evidence he's done so, and one thing that's positive about Bitcoin is that it would be extremely easy to tell if Nakamoto were to, say, flood the exchanges with his own million or so BTC) then he'd need to be held to account, which cannot be done anonymously.

But in general I agree, and at this point, despite my misgivings about his work, believe he should have his privacy respected.

I'm pretty sure it's legal in both countries. The only question here is supposedly whether Dell is violating the Firefox trademark. Dell argues they're not because they're charging for installation. I don't know if that m

But minus the trademark issue, Dell certainly can charge for copies of Firefox, even if it ends up having to install Iceweasel instead. So can I. It's Free Software/Open Source, shipped under a Free Software/Open Source license, and as long as Dell complies with, for example, any copyleft provisions, it can do whatever it wants and charge whatever it wants. There's a myth that you can't charge for Free Software/Open Source software. That's never been true. Indeed, that's one of the ways the FSF originally funded itself, selling tapes containing copies of GNU.

X11 is the technically superior choice. #getoffmylawn

Still, from that point of view, the Mir thing has been a success for all those itching to replace a stable, mature, well known and tested, versatile, and powerful windowing system with a new and untested stripped down windowing system simply because they don't understand why someone would want some of the features X11 has, and are under the impression it's bloated because it's bigger than Windows 2.0 was in 1989.

Mir has helped create the illusion the decision has been made already. We are transitioning, no more debate is needed (or will be accepted) as to whether we should, and the question is what we should transition to.

Much the same mistake was made with GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, a transition that Ubuntu helped along in the same way with Unity. Users rebelled, with forks like Mint attempting to roll back the damage, but the end result was a deterioration in the perception of GNU/Linux as a potential replacement for Windows. Distributions based upon GNOME 3 and Unity got the "slick", "professional", treatment, with users finding fast that it wasn't what they actually wanted. The GNOME 2 hold-outs didn't have the resources to ensure GNOME 2's forks had the same level of support, and so ended up with systems that looked to new users dated and ugly.

We will see the same with Mir/Wayland, except worse. We'll have five to ten years of having to deal with an immature windowing system that, by the end of the process, has just as many hacks and quirks as X11 but will almost certainly still lack key features X11 offers. X11 holdouts will find themselves using an increasingly unreliable and unstable platform as newer hardware requires new device drivers, without the level of support needed within the X.org X11 community to support them.

We're all going to lose. The best free software users can hope for now is that Google continues to extend Android to eventually offer a decent desktop experience. I don't know why they would, perhaps to replace ChromeOS, but at least you're looking at something mature there. But that's not here now, and the next five years will be rough for GNU/Linux users. We'll likely be as mainstream as FreeBSD by the end of it.

Yes, they've done it once or twice, with a tiny number of the headline issues, took an age to do so, and only did so because people were screaming about it.

This is a perverse argument for claiming that something isn't open.

Android is open. Period. The fact Google creates massive incentives to manufacturers to use proprietary middleware on Android is neither here nor there. You might just as well argue that the PC architecture isn't open, because Microsoft creates incentives for PC manufacturers to install Windows.