Sweet, what's the API like?

Why a government? Probably because lots and lots of people *trust national governments* a lot more than they do a "random group of hackers" (as they perceive it) and the Estonian government hopes to leverage this into goodwill resulting in more buys at their ICO, and a long-term raise in value - both of which generate a lot of revenue for their citizens.

Even if that backing is only the full faith and credit of the US Government

Isn't Bitcoin backed by the full faith and credit of all Bitcoin owners?

The Ugly: Government agencies now have a valid excuse to obtain funding for exponentially increasing the number of exit nodes under their control.

Eh? Previously there were sites selling drugs, child porn, guns and materials to make boms from. But the agencies did *not* have a valid excuse to deal with them? Now, suddenly, there's a few random racist nutballs publishing a pseudo-newspaper on there and *NOW* that's enough to give them a valid excuse?

They have these people called locksmiths. Apparently they are really good at picking locks or making keys to get through locks. Crazy I know. Much easier to physically break a door down.

I can see you have never worked in a large company on a Monday morning when there is a problem. One where the suggestion alone is enough to cause some "oohs" and "ummms" among people. When you query them what the noises are for, no-one is aware of which colleague would be the right one to sign off on such a purchase order. So it takes about 6 hours, but eventually someone finds an old print out of the regulations about circumventing access to buildings out of hours, and thinks it applies, and discovers who to contact. The next morning that contact gets back to you, and following a few phone calls and an email chain in the afternoon they finally agree a locksmith is appropriate in an email. You're then able to send the email to Purchasing from whom you get back a form email saying that they are busy and will respond ASAP. Phone calls to Purchasing are ignored because they are busy.

So now it's Tuesday evening, and time to go home. Wednesday you hear nothing from them, but finally on Thursday Purchasing get back to you before launch and authorise your request. You cannot use just any locksmith though, you *MUST* use a locksmith from the AUTHORISED SUPPLIER LIST, which they duly send you. The nearest locksmith on the list is a 3 hour drive away, too late to get to the office before 5pm so you reluctantly tell him to come tomorrow (Friday) but he is already booked and cannot do it before Monday. He has the contact details of three other locksmiths who could do it, but none are on the authorised supplier list. So you got back to the list, phone another one further away and they agree to come out on Saturday morning.

Fast forward to Saturday morning, you come into the office at 9am on your day off, the wife and kids are seething, and at 9.30 the guy isn't there. The office don't pickup the phone because the office is closed weekends and his cell number doesn't work. After waiting until midday you assume that he isn't coming and go home.

It's now Monday morning at 9.15 and you're on hold waiting to talk to the THIRD and final supplier on the authorised supplier list when your boss walks in back from his week off. With the key.

Now do you understand why breaking the door down is going to be preferable in most larger businesses?

Life expectancy is higher for liberals than conservatives? And life expectancy is going down for Red State voters and up for Blue State voters. So it'll all work out for the best.

Have you compared the average number of children per mother for Red and Blue voters? And what about the age at which they have those children? Cos it's quite possible to die 5 years younger than peers from another group, but outbreed them trivially by starting at 19 and having 6 kids...

The Information Technology Industry Council, which represents companies including Amazon, Apple, Adobe, Dell, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Visa, Nokia, and Microsoft railed against the bill

Top 100 H1B Visa employers (companies who profit through the program): https://www.myvisajobs.com/Rep...

#16 Amazon
#22 Apple
#60 Dell
#33 Facebook
#100 HP
#12 Google
...
# 9 Microsoft

Are you kidding me? I would say yes, and most people I know would say yes, too. That's $300 - anyone I know already knows my interests, the locations I've been the past don't really matter, and my browsing history? Why the hell would I be worried about that? There's little "embarrassing" in there except perhaps the stuff I've watched on Pornhub, and for $300 you are VERY welcome to know what my particular interests are. If you searched hard enough on some forums you could find that out anyway.

So... how often are we going to do this transaction? Can I get $300 a year? A month? Every day?

Has Trump done something about it yet?

Yes, I am a Brit trying to get into the US on the H1B program because my girlfriend is there. It is now significantly harder to get companies to even talk to me since they defunded priority applications. My best shot is to apply in April, for a visa that *may* start in October. My chances of getting it are very slim though.

Note that I'm in software, in London, earn a very good salary and have 20 years of experience - I'm a model candidate - and I've been told by some people over there that I may as well not bother and to "explore other options"...

the energy source they believe to be cheap, safe and clean is neither cheap, nor safe, nor clean

Actually, it certainly is SAFE and CLEAN - but you're right that it's not cheap. Not until you take into account the cost of the CO2 emitted by LNG-burning plants which are what you get if you don't choose nuclear. Then suddenly they look real cheap.

But no-one is taking that into account...

Surely the correct way to go about this is: 1. Idea for product. 2. Design product. 3. Build product. 4. Test product. 5. Sell product. 6. Profit.

How do you propose paying for steps 2, 3 and 4? Or should only incredibly rich people be allowed to start a company?

My girlfriend asked me about this earlier. I read an article and a PDF of the complaint (in court, against Mikkelson) and the best summary I could come up with was this:

1] He owned the company (Company A, which owns Snopes) 50/50 with his wife
2] They divorced badly, she sold her shares to Company B
3] Company A was founded such that a COMPANY cannot hold shares in it for smallprint legal reasons. So the 5 owners of company each INDIVIDUALLY got some shares of Company A
4] Company B has been doing a lot of the running of the Snopes.com website and controlled some aspects of it (this is unclear)
5] He (Mikkelson) has recently been courting one of the 5 owners of Company B to come over to his "side" so that he controls more than 50 per cent of Company (controls, not owns) and can do what he wants
6] The other four owners of Company B are angry, as the 5th guy appears to have defected. They claim variously that Mikkelson has used company funds to pay for personal stuff, that the 5th guy was legally bound, via an agreement, not to act against the interests of the other 4 guys, and that Mikkelson has done something wrong in enticing him to move to the "other side".

Mikkelson is now appealing on GoFundMe for money... so he can fight for ownership of the company and defend himself from the lawsuit brought by Company B.

And people are throwing money at him, a quarter of a million dollars in just 9 hours.

I don't know who is right, who is wrong, and what claims from the PDF are factual or not, but the general feel of the GoFundMe page is slimy. He is not raising funds to pay off some debt that Snopes owes (like Wikipedia), he is instead RAISING MONEY SO HE CAN FIGHT FOR OWNERSHIP OF THE BUSINESS THAT PAYS HIS SALARY. And if wins, the rest of the money is pure profit, which he could then pay himself with.

PDF of complaint:
http://www.poynter.org/wp-cont...

Even with the move toward more agile development and DevOps, vulnerabilities continue to take off...

*needs citation Seriously, I'm a software developer and often have to be involved in a variety of security-related aspects of development and I've been doing it for twenty years. My anecdotal evidence is that security exploits are way *way* down in terms of risk and severity compared to when I entered the industry... I could be wrong (the plural of anecdote is not data) but it feels the opposite for me.

I actually read the article. There are many reasons why the CTO is incompetent, but one is that THE USERNAME AND PASSWORD FOR THE PRODUCTION DATABASE WERE IN PLAINTEXT IN A PIECE OF WIDELY DISTRIBUTED DOCUMENTATION. That alone is utterly crazy. For the sake of making this post more positive, here's a few things the company could/should have done here: 1] Don't have credentials in documentation, they should be in a password vault. 2] PCs on the developer network should have ZERO access to a live environment, ever, even if they have the correct credentials 3] Have working backups, test them regularly. Have backups online and offline in multiple locations 4] Have a release manager or similar code-review or sense check *all* changes which could be deployed to live

It would have cost far less than the £100 million estimated cost of this incident

I agree that they should do it, but it is unlikely that the one-off cost of implementing always-on redundant systems would be this cheap, the scale and scope of the IT systems involved in the airline industry is enormous and it's likely it would cost significantly more than that. There are also ongoing costs to consider. Source: Work in software development, have seen projects in organisations way smaller and simpler than British Airways with projected costs higher than that for less benefit.