Learn to play, noob! was written partially to address some of the things that make people gratuitiously unhappy.

He did as much as was necessary to establish trust and no more.

I just want to say to Xavier - thanks. Great work.

Perhaps not, but not many people are going to drive to work in 3 feet of snow either. Does that make cars useless?

When the weather is conducive, people getting on bikes and reducing motor vehicle exhaust will make the city a more pleasant place to be. There are many places where people can walk or cycle enough that it is worthwhile. Take a look at Cambridge in the UK - the bicycle park at the train station has approximately two orders of magnitude more parked bikes during the day than the car park has parked cars, and there's plenty of wet weather in Cambridge. During the evening, the majority of traffic is bicycles not cars, which means residents get quieter streets since a bike makes a lot less noise (while waiting for the bus after pub kicking out time, I think I counted ten bicycles for every car).

Cycling carries its dangers, but cycling (even in a city) is probably less dangerous than not exercising at all.

It's non-binding because the EU Parliament is not a real Parliament. It's very weak and has limited influence, the real power at the EU level is in the European Commission which is sort of like an executive branch that is directed by national governments. The EU Commission may still decide to ignore the Parliament on this one, but I guess that wouldn't do a great deal for their legitimacy, which is at any rate already heavily weakened after years of sustained attacks on their decision making ...

Well SWIFT is based in Belgium. Now their failover datacenter is not in America anymore the US theoretically doesn't have much political leverage left, and will have to rely on hacking. How good their IT security is anyones guess, but they've been around a while and more importantly will be on the alert. A lot of this hacking was invisible for so long because nobody was looking for it. You'll notice that once Snowden started leaking the GCHQ operation against Belgacom was busted, Merkel's phone being tapped got busted by German intelligence, etc. Belgian counter-intelligence will probably be a part of defending SWIFT. They know 5 Eyes are coming for them, and when you know an attack is coming it's much easier to fight it off.

And more specifically, they're talking about a program that undermines SWIFT. As a reminder, in the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration concluded that it could find terrorists through financial transaction tracking. The problem - global wire transfers and other financial messaging is controlled by a Belgian company. The CIA apparently had to be almost restrained from just immediately hacking them outright. Instead the US Treasury got involved and SWIFT were forced to hand over data by virtue of them having a US based datacenter (as a backup for their EU datacenter).

SWIFT have said, several times and on the record, that they are not happy about being abused for political purposes and immediately began constructing a second backup datacenter also in the EU. The USA, seeing that their leverage over SWIFT was starting to disappear, decided to apply heavy pressure the EU in order to avoid losing access to this data source even after the US datacenter was decommissioned. The result was the EU data sharing agreement.

The EU parliament was never particularly happy about this arrangement and insisted on there being auditing, etc, which turned out to be a worthless rubber-stamping exercise in which the EU appointed inspectors tried to visit the US Treasury and get reliable documentation on what the data was being used for, but were told to go fuck themselves and that the information they needed was classified. So basically the EU folded under pressure and was then abused, to nobodies surprise at all.

Now that the TFTP data sharing agreement is suspended, and SWIFT no longer need their US datacenter, the only way back in is hacking. And I'm sure the people at SWIFT know that, and will do their best to stop it.

Anyway, this is a very good thing. Next up - airline passenger data!

The article is pretty light on details, but it's entirely possible that this capacitor type will have a too high equivalent series resistance (ESR) to work well as a decoupling capacitor.

Seconded. And the Holodeck is being invented by Scotty. In between his regular job of maintaining the ship that keeps getting abused.

Write
Better
Stories

Bad acting is forgivable if the story is interesting.

You'd think that a fan developed work would at least be able to keep canon consistent.

That's the clearest sign yet that Wikipedia is fucked - the Foundation which somehow manages to chew through millions of dollars annually can't even ship a goddamn visual editing widget without the whole thing being reverted!

I used to donate to Wikipedia because it's a site I use a lot, but the fact that they can try and fail to do something as basic as make Wikipedia NOT a pain in the ass to edit makes me wish I could ask for my money back.

187 people?! What the hell do they do all day?

Anyway, I agree with the sentiment in this thread. The last time I tried to actually make a change to Wikipedia it was the most unbelievably retarded experience I've had for a long time. The fact that that community would try to kill something as basic as a WYSIWYG editor doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Basic summary of experience: The Wikipedia article on Bitcoin has a statement like, "Bitcoin has been criticised for being a ponzi scheme". The citations for this "fact" are, (1) an article in The Register which simply repeats the statement that "Bitcoin has been criticised for having the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme" and links to some random guys blog post which doesn't even make that claim, and (2) an article in Reuters which again says at the top merely that it's been "variously dismissed as a Ponzi scheme or lauded as the greatest invention since the internet".

The problems here are numerous. Firstly, the citations don't actually back up the claim. Even though finding idiots on the internet who don't understand the definition of any given term is trivial, neither citation succeeds in actually doing so. Instead they merely assert that unspecific people believe that, which is circular. Secondly, one can actually check the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme and see that a free-floating asset class cannot meet that definition. So the claim fails basic logic.

There have been raging arguments about this on the Talk page for over a year now, heck maybe over two years. Here's a quote from the current incarnation:

While I agree with your analysis [that the statement is not supported by the citations], both sources are reliable; unless you can find a source that explicitly goes in-depth on how Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme, the cited passage is valid. We're unable to argue with reliable sources as that would be original research.

This is the kind of "what the fuck" statement that just kills interest in editing Wikipedia dead. This guy, who is apparently quite knowledgeable about Wikipedia's policies, agrees that the statement is bogus yet says it cannot be removed due to Wikipedia policy - in flat and total contradiction of common sense.

Previous rounds of this flamewar (that were since deleted) did in fact provide well reasoned arguments that the statement was false, some written specifically for Wikipedia. But it turned out that they were all invalidated by Wikipedia policy because variously, someones blog was not a valid source (whereas an article on the Register was), logic-based discussion on the Talk page was "original research", etc.

When you see pages which are camped by idiots who constantly cite policy as a justification for ignoring basic common sense you quickly realise the entire project is doomed. Something like Wikipedia can only work if there's some kind of strong personality or driving force that actively shapes the community in a positive direction. A rudderless community rapidly devolves into absurd bureaucratic in-fighting of the kind that makes the civil service look proactive and lean. In that regard TFA is completely correct.

> This level of trading does not do the market any good, and puts individual investors at a severe disadvantage against firms like this.

But does it really? HFT has reduced the spread from the seller's price to what the investor pays by a large amount, meaning the investor (the person who buys shares and holds onto them for a long time) gets a better deal.

There's another important difference between Greece and the US - Greece doesn't have its own currency. The US can inflate itself out of debt. Greece was as trapped as an individual who maxed out their credit cards.