Rubbish. I am far from a bitcoin cheerleader, but i can't imagine that this is the government firing an opening salvo at bitcoin.

Why would they cut off only Dwolla, but leave Mt.Gox standing? US clients can still wire funds to and from Gox, and can transfer their bitcoin balances anywhere they choose.

Why wouldn't they call in a favor from Japan and raid Mt.Gox's offices there and shutdown their computers - that would freeze all of the money that Gox is holding AND freeze all of their clients Bitcoin balances? Think about what the gov't did to Kim Dotcom and attempts with the Pirate Bay.

Why would the lead be taken by the DHS rather than the Treasury or Office of Controlled Foreign Assets?

Why would they leave the mt.gox domain name operating as normal? They pull domains that are linked to illegal activity at the snap of a finger, why leave Mt.Gox up and running?

And why go after Mt.Gox first - I mean, yes, they're the biggest, but with a few swieps of the pen, the government could shutdown every bitcoin exchange and transmitter in the US. It would take just about no effort to accomplish that, and then they could focus on the big fish.

And would they really need to go through that effort? they've got the NSA - i'm certain that those fellows could direct enough resources at the bitcoin network that they could overtake the collective hashing power that the network now has. Maybe not immediately, but in a relatively short period of time. All they would have to do is broadcast they they now have the majority of the hashing power, and there goes all confidence in Bitcoin. Who would tie up any capital in there at all if they know that any single entity could suddenly decide to start overwriting transactions and generally causing all sorts of havoc to the network?

So no. As much as I don't think bitcoins have a long-term future, or even a medium term one, this isn't an opening shot of a bigger war.

Where have you been? Clearly not readings articles and comments on slashdot. Because if you were, you'd know that open source is the only way to go. Not just that, but information wants to be free, besides which, piracy impliesv"theft" which can only occur if you deprive someone of their bits when you acquire those bits of your own. So if your tool is any good, it will be copied rampantly. The drm mechanism will be cracked, and 9 out of every 10 users will be using copies for which you'll receive zero compensation. That leaves providing support as your only option. Which is useless for a simple tool that presumably would y need much support.

That leaves your best option as making the program incredibly complicated, so that e en If someone gets their hands on your program, it'll be useless without a support contract.

Because everyone here knows - those bits you create are just bits. App, music or movie, the creator of them shou,d expect no control or compensation once they go on the Internet. Right guys?

what if the court finds that there is actual infringement going on and orders damages not be paid until piratebay ceases providing magnet links to other infringing material on their website?

I'm sorry, I have no sympathy for piratebay. It's piracy plain and simple. People ought to own up to what they're doing, stealing, not saying information wants to be free or what not. And enjoy it while it lasts. Which will be a much shorter period of time if piratebay instists on instead of trying to stay one step ahead of the law and technology, instead decides they want to fight out such trivial cases in the courtrooms...

this is a great big fuckup on piratebays part... they're high on confidence or what not. WHat do they want to prove? That copying copyrighted material is illegal? Do they really want to go there?

Very silly idea, and not at all thought through. Unless they did think it through and still determine that this was something worth pretending to pursue.

I'm not an inventor nor do I pretend to be.

But the guy created a hand-crank powered radio.

There wasn't much of a market for that I'm guessing, as who wants to crank a radio non-stop just to listen? So the company he worked with created a radio whose battery was powered by the hand crank, and that was the one that sold, not his design.

If HE was Microsoft and the company was him, you'd all be championing them for successfully working around the patent, and making a better product to boot. If he'd patented the hand crank to generate DC power alone, then he'd have had a defendable patent, but he patented a complicated device and someone else came along and created a different device that was similar and improved.

Again, reverse the rolls and the company in the story would be the hero and he'd be the villian for trying to apply a form of patent creep to his original invention...

He said it himself:

"“I was very foolish. I didn’t protect my product properly and allowed other people to take my product away."

He was foolish. Enough said. If you don't take advantage of the laws and protections that you're afforded, and then you get screwed, it's not a failing of the laws, it's a failing of the inventor.

I was just discussing this the other day, how so many companies overlook the importance of marketing, because it isn't easily quantifiable. A business owner can be far too tempted to think that their sales are organic, word of mouth generated and cease writing further checks to whoever does their marketing. That, at least, is what has occurred at a restaurant I like a lot - and since the marketing dollars have disappeared, so has crowd. All other things being equal, marketing is was separates a successful business or product launch from a poor one or a failure. Taken to an extreme, marketing is what separates a successful bad product over an unsuccessful good product. I'm glad that you realized this too.

As for how to go about doing it. I'd say you're correct in wanting to not bring Ina non performing marketing partner. So keep them separate, outside of thie business. Take in money from one of the many investors that wants in and start working with a person or firm. If you don't like them, you're not married to them.

Considering that for the first one or two decades of Photoshops existance, the print industry was the main purchaser of photoshop (or the design industry, which would then send finished files to the print industry), it's been a pretty important feature. OK, it wasn't there in version 1.0, but soon thereafter. Yes, now more and more design work is done for online audiences, but many companies do in fact blend their online and offline marketing pieces.

CMYK is an incredibly important feature; maybe slashdotters overlook it, but releasing an image editor without CMYK was like introducing a database without the ability to sort the data. Pantone important too, but not nearly as much as CMYK.

As for GIMP. I've tried it again and again over the years, and even for free, i can't imagine replacing Photoshop with it. It might just be that I've used Photoshop so long that it's completely ingrained in me, but i've always failed to see why people are all excited about GIMP. It seems like a great free program to get you feet wet with, but once you start pushing forward, Photoshop has been the place to be.

Albeit, I haven't touched GIMP in a couple of years, but I can't imagine that they re-envisioned the program since the last time I looked.

It's definetly not apples to apples, as there is no aquisition cost stated for the home server, just the upgrades that will make it serve its new life. Which is fine for him, but not good for anyone else trying to objectively figure out the same for their own circumstance.

That said - I investigated the same, and ultimately wound up setting up a server at home as well. I actually invested money into it, buying a new Intel i7 machine, a pair of 2 TB hard drives to go along with the 1 TB driver it came with, and boosted the RAM to 16 GB. Yes, it was an investment, comparitively speaking. But for that investment, I've got:

A Fileserver from Turnkey Linux, which I look at as a Dropbox replacement, except the space is essentially unlimited and the data resides on my own computer rather than on Amazon's; I can access it via the web or via an iPhone app, though.

An SSH Gateway to the rest of my house. Currently, it runs CentOS, but will be creating an OpenBSD VM specifically for that purpose (yes, I know that Theo would disapprove, but it seems to me that all things being equal, if a VM is going to be used anyway, may as well go with the one that's likely more secure, even though it would seem from the dated conversations I've read, that he'd say the security of the system is shot for running in a VM).

Several other instances that I can spin up as desired; a Windows 7 VM (by recyling the OEM original license that came with the machine, which I assume is legal), so I can access Quickbooks when needed from anywhere, a dedicated Centos Solr Server which is running for a test project, and several other dedicated VM's that I need from time to time..

And lots of spare capacity to boot. I'd hate to see what my monthly charges would be for this many dedicated VM's from a cloud provider. And I definitely appreciate KVM's ability to compartmentalize processes, while sharing the underlying hardware. Much cheaper this way, I think, than having 7 or 8 VM's at Amazon, some always on, others turning on and off as needed. And far cheaper than dedicating a different machine to each task, both up front and in terms of recurring (electricity) charges.

But basically - I'd think it would be expecting something for nothing to think that you could take a 24/7 computer and make your costs go down by putting it in the cloud. The provider has the same costs as you, maybe the negotiate cheaper rates for electricity, but after that, they then have to pay staff and turn a profit. That probably changes some once you're talking tens or hundreds of servers, and especially does once you're using them on demand rather than having your instances run 24/7. But for a single server, I don't think you'd find a cost savings going to the cloud if you look at it over the long run. The downside is you need to pay your fixed costs up front, rather than amortizing them across the life of your VM usage if you went to the cloud.

I tend to think that unless the degree is required for a certification or license you're going for, it's most likely an overrated piece of paper that's extremely expensive and time consuming to obtain.

I have zero college under my belt, entered the workforce straight from high school and by the time my friends started graduating, I was getting hired over them And earning more to boot, as I actually had 4 years of experience and a portfolio of real world work. Fast forward 20 years later (where I am now) and I wouldn't have done it any differently. Not once in my life have I been turned down for lack of degree or lack of diploma. Nor did I have college debt to pay off.

The flip side is you need to be self motivated. I can't even start to list off how many books and manuals I've read. I was probably 17 and wanted to get my feet wet video editing, so I read the manual for adobe premiere 4.0 (or maybe 4.2) cover to cover. And even today, I'm awaiting my delivery from amazon of a book about solr and another about Hadoop.

If you're motivated you can do it. Getting started is the hardest - with no education or experience it'll be had to break in. I offered my services free originally, and once I was hired spent countless hours at the office after hours fiddling around and learning. And now, again, no complaints

At least for ios updates, ignore the version number and just consider it a dot update. Really, everything has been so slow and incremental, it's hard looking back to name which features came from which ipdate. Not like it matters, and there's no cause for disappointment - the updates are provided free and incrementally add new feature to your iPhone whether its2 months old or 2 years old. Ios 6.1 could have been ios 4.7 for all I care - even version numbers are marketing gimmick at this point. For everyone, not just apple. But what can you expect, so many of these technologies are now matured, it's not like major revisions are in order for any platform at this point, I don't think.

On the iPhone, while yes, it's a choice, people simply aren't adverse to upgrading because it's an efforless process. Even when you had to plug it in, that was all you had to do, plug it in and click the OK button. Androids certainly aren't that straight forward, and no, most times, after release, the device is abandoned by the manufacturer. You can't deny that. That users are daunted by the upgrade process speaks to their comfortability with the OS - yes, its their fault for not updating when it is available, but if the process isn't simple enough, apparent enough or advertised enough, they simply won't do it - as we see now.

Android should not be getting the free pass from so many slashdotters as it does. Neither should google, for that matter. But they both certainly seem to be.

Your missing the point. Users aren't failing to update, they're not provided with any updates at all.

At least it's voluntary, and the vast majority of info is info you provided knowingly. Maybe not knowing every way it could be used, but knowingly none the less. Google on the other hand, you can't escape no matter how hard you try.

If everyone but you is posting real information,and referring to you occasionally by name, your online persona is cracked. And really, that last bit if minutiae, your name, is insignificant compared to everything else. Your name is not the keying field, so it's not like lacking a real name for you they haven't had a way to aggregate other info band you can say you work at Goldman Sachs, but if the ip youre logging into during the day resolves to a college ip, they know better. Just as if you say you own the federal reserve, but they spot you logging in at night from a slum and constantly logging in along bus routes, they know better. And logging in isn't even logging in, it's just visiting a site with a like button embedded in it.

How tricky you were. I'll give you credit for at least trying, though!