Interesting. I was burned in a weird way by SourceForge's descent into evil. A friend who was managing my BTC for me (long story) was a victim of the PyWallet trojan and lost ~40BTC in April 2016. :-( I tried to get her to use the GitHub posted version of PyWallet, but she wasn't (at the time) familiar with how to download stuff from GitHub. :-(

I actually really despise Git as a tool. One really spectacular feature would be if all repositories that were either git or Mercurial could be transparently accessed by either. I have some significant commits in Mercurial, though I haven't worked on it in a very long time. I might be able to help. :-)

I think police should need a warrant to use facial recognition in many cases. I also feel that perhaps searches of electronic devices and online accounts need to strictly limit exactly what is searched for and disallow any evidence of any crimes not listed in the warrant from being used.

The 4th amendment is supposed to make it hard to prosecute certain kinds of crime. In my opinion, the police really have no business going after crime that isn't reported to them anyway, except for a few exceptions like murder.

It's only propaganda if you routinely reject the evidence of your own senses.

That's who Trump answers to, not us. :-/

Who the 10x developer or 25x programmer is is often highly context dependent. And it also tends to discount people who play supporting roles, who I think can often be even more valuable than your main developers.

I consider H1-B's to be very problematic because of how dependent they make someone on an employer. I think there's a real risk of the employer employee relationship becoming too coercive and akin to slavery.

But, I have no problem with more immigration if the result is full citizens with the same rights as everybody else.

Perhaps we should have an accelerated citizenship process for people who've been here on an H1-B visa for over a year. That, in combination with actually reducing the number of H1-B visas granted would be something I could get behind.

The main negative effect I see from my proposal is that it reduces these large corporations incentive to improve the educational and vocational rehabilitation system to create the workers they need from our existing citizenry.

H1-B's are not about importing tech workers. They're about both creating a class of workers who are dependent on their employer's good will to stay in the country and about making it easier to ship jobs overseas.

I would be much happier if it became easier for people with certain skills to become full citizens. Then they have a stake in our country and our economy.

The first article is a shill for an industry that would dearly love to be able to treat developers poorly. If they can get a whole ton of developers from other countries who are dependent on their employer's good will to even stay here they can lower the standards by which they treat all their employees.

Additionally, of course, it means that the elites can continue to let the US education system slide into uselessness and unaffordability because they can find some other country's education system to parasitize instead.

*nod* Point taken about it being hardware. You're right.

I would rather they insist that any such equipment bought by the US government be open and fully independently auditable. I think they would do a lot better for everybody if they simply made that a standard requirement of the procurement process.

Though, I can also well understand the paranoia. The US government has done the exact same thing to security equipment sold to other countries that they are now worried about China doing to us. They should be worried about that.

The thing I appreciate the most about my MacBook Prop is its durability. The case is a solid machined block of aluminum. It does not flex or creak. Everything inside the laptop is solidly situated and solid-state. I wouldn't purposely drop it from a height or anything, but I'm not too worried about normal wear causing a lot of problems either.

I resent having to buy an Apple product in order to get this. I want something that's not a piece of flexing trashy plastic.

That wouldn't be progress. How many people would bother to figure out how to take the time to do that? No, it has to be so simple to do that it can be done trivially by almost anybody but still require physical access to the machine.

Well, I certainly don't think its value will 'only increase'. I think that the ideal scenario has a more or less smooth S curve in which the value increases to a certain level then plateaus. After that, I would expect the value to fluctuate up and down a bit, and on average increase slowly.

Anyway, we'll likely see how it all pans out. There are enough businesses now that accept it that it's not going away in a heartbeat. And a secure way to pay for things with your smartphone with a similar level of anonymity as cash would be very nice to have.

That is an interesting take. And you might be right. I'm not sure. I know that I intend to spend bitcoins. I will do that because if I don't they won't end up having any value at all. But that requires a certain amount of long-term thinking that hasn't generally characterized our modern financial institutions.