Swing has been replaced with JavaFX, which is a very modern and rather slick UI framework. It's got a very nice skin, can be styled with CSS, is rendered via OpenGL or Direct3D with all the attendant features that provides, has a full blown animation and effects framework, a good visual designer (no longer left up to IDE makers), uses native file choosers, and can reliably hit 60 frames per second. Also the API is very clean and so far I found it a joy to work with.

The downside? Of course, Java 8 is huge and bundling it makes your apps have a big download. Boo. JWrapper looks like a good way to make stripped down cross platform native installers though, but I didn't get a chance to try it yet.

Multiple inheritance is a feature nearly no modern language has, but Java 8 does support mixins which are how most languages provide similar functionality (interface method definitions can now have bodies).

Co-operation? I highly, highly doubt that.

I can see only two possibilities for how the NSA could collect every single phone call of an entire country, such that the Washington Post would agree not to publish the name of the country. One is that it's something like North Korea where the infrastructure is really weak and there might conceivably be only a handful of points where all telephone calls pass through. If a covert team on the ground were able to splice those fibres, or hack the telephone equipment remotely, and somehow duplicate the internal traffic onto fibres heading out of the country , I can see they could be intercepted at that point.

The other possibility is that it's a small country that's supposed to be "allied" (Washington does not really have allies), like Belgium, seat of the EU. We know that GCHQ hacked Belgacom pretty badly. Undoubtably the NSA has done the same with other telcos. In this case, the WashPo agrees not to disclose it to avoid causing even more severe diplomatic fallout (though this was apparently not a concern so far). For a small but modern country it's quite feasible to imagine hacked telephone equipment simply sending all phone call data out over the internet or a fibre that's meant to be dark without anyone actually noticing, as phone calls are relatively low bandwidth.

Regardless, this is pretty amazing. Every time I think these fuckers can't get any creepier, they do. First OPTIC NERVE and now this.

These stories always leave me depressed. It's clear nothing is going to happen, the politicians all seem to be creaming themselves over these powers and can't wait to legalise it all ... then they can conveniently go after anyone who is breaking their collection with crypto.

I'd be interested to know your background. Are you Ukrainian? The information I was able to find seems to disagree with you.

There are no "two" of Ukraine, this division is part of Kremlin's false narrative.

Seeing as you brought up language, here's what happened when in 2012 the government passed a law that would allow Russian to be an officially recognised language in parts of the country where it was being used: fist fights broke out in Parliament. Yeah, real unified. They had a major fight over allowing Russian to be used legally by the people who actually speak it just two years ago.

Presently, both languages are officially recognized.

Yes, they are, despite that one of the first acts of the new parliament in Ukraine was to try and revert the 2012 law. The only reason it didn't happen is that the law, which was passed by the majority of parliamentarians, was vetoed by the new Prime Minister.

Russia has done, economically, much better than Ukraine over the past years. Its people are better off and GDP per capita is a lot higher. What's more, no matter which government is in power in Kiev it seems to throw major fits over basic things like whether the Russian language should be officially recognised, despite the clear reality on the ground. Is it any wonder that maybe the people in Crimea don't seem to be too worried about joining Russia? The election may well have been biased or rigged - it's hard to know because the west refused to send any official observers - but we just saw Ukrainians engage in massive street protests in Kiev. I didn't see any such protests happening in Crimea yet.

There's more hints of this in her article. It starts out by complaining about "aggressive communication on pull requests" and how little the men respected her opinion.

In quite some years working in the software business I have occasionally seen men and women genuinely be dicks on code review threads, but I have never once seen an entire group of people be dicks simultaneously. What I have seen, repeatedly, is people who do not have any engineering background bump up against the no nonsense, no bullshit get-it-done-now attitude that is pervasive in the software world. This is especially a problem for people from fuzzy marketing-type backgrounds, which is what this woman has, and especially on code review threads, where reviewers always have a backlog and writing each line-by-line comment as if it were a formal business letter would waste staggering amounts of time.

My experience has been that men love it when a woman turns up and gets real, respectable work done! What men definitely don't love is when they reply to some request saying "That won't work because of X" and this is interpreted as aggressive by the person whose work was not up to scratch (whether it be men or women). If she couldn't get respect on her code review threads and perceived the communication as aggressive, I bet the real story is that nobody was being aggressive but her work simply contained lots of mistakes, and having them pointed out without any cushioning (as is normal) hurt her ego.

Reading this story has not made any difference to my desire to work for github. It has reminded me of other times in my previous job where similar issues cropped up, though not normally so publicly. The genuine fault ALWAYS lay with the complainer.

Is the iTunes Store not to your satisfaction? It's always worked fine for me. I never notice the DRM.

No, I think you didn't parse the story carefully enough. If you look, it's saying that MITM attacks are the kind of thing that COULD be used to break SSL, if you had bogus certificates. It does not say that there's any evidence of this actually happening on a large scale, and indeed one of the surprising things about the Snowden leaks so far is that there isn't much (any?) evidence of SSL sabotage, even though it obviously must be one of their highest priority targets. The MITM attacks that NSA/GCHQ have been doing have all been reported as being against sites that, at the time the attacks took place, were not doing SSL.

Regardless, if all you want to do is inject an exploit into a browser you don't need to beat SSL. It's not widespread enough so eventually someone will browse to a non-SSLd website (like slashdot) and get pwnd. At that point you can read all traffic before it gets encrypted.

Syria is a country far from the UK that has no connection to Britain at all, and despite that we (I'm also a Brit) are so amazed at ourselves for the fact that politicians finally voted no. Why the hell did the decision even come up in the first place? Right, because both Blair and Cameron are warmongers who squeal with delight the moment a far off country destabilises because it gives them a chance to prance around on the "world stage", as they put it. Not so different from what they accuse Putin of, is it?

Ukraine is right on the border of Russia and has a lot of Russian people in it. The first thing the new Ukrainian government did (if you want to call the outcome of a revolution/coup a government) is start to try and suppress the Russian language. If you're looking for a better analogy, perhaps look at Ireland, the long-festering Troubles and the occupation-like conditions that parts of Ireland were put under by the British Army at times.

George Bush and Obama were also very popular at times. Is the majority of the USA suffering from mass psychosis?

Putin is popular because the economy of Russia has recovered a lot since he took power. There isn't really anything magical about this. It's the same with China. Leaders that make poor populations a lot wealthier get a lot of slack in the authoritarianism department.

Actually the latest polling on Scotland gives more like 38-40% in the "yes" block.

I would like to see evidence for your claim that Ukraine is not really a divided country and that's all Putin's propaganda. Everything else I've seen suggests that Ukraine really is a highly divided country with a large population of people who would prefer to be a part of Russia than the EU. I'm not convinced this is something Putin is just making up.

The problem here is that the west has already decided it doesn't matter what the outcome of the Crimean referendum is - if Russia wins, that must be because of foul play, intimidation or excessive "propaganda" (as if western elections are not also filled with propaganda). In fact, I don't see any way the people living there could ever actually decide they prefer to be aligned with Russia without western powers decrying it as the work of the dastardly Putin.

Here's an idea. Why don't you go compare American propaganda (Obama's comments) vs Russian propaganda (Putin's comments). In particular note that Obama doesn't even bother taking press questions any more, whereas Putin takes lots of very aggressive and straightforward ones.

I think it's something specific to MacBooks. I used to find I could hardly see the background, but if I tilted the screen a bit suddenly there it was back in the old yellow colour. The new yellow "Ad" icon is much easier to see though.

Google went public a decade ago. I think you have to do a better job of showing cause/effect than that.

It's also just wrong. From 3G onwards phones authenticate the cell towers. Even with a full stack running you wouldn't be easily able to force a phone to associate to your tower, at least not without jamming all the other towers in your vicinity.

For example, scaling the network up to 2000 transactions per second would result in a Bitcoin node downloading about 1 MB per second. No big deal, until you realize that means each node will need about 2.6 TB of bandwidth each month, and that's just to handle the needs of 10% of the population of the United States, assuming 5 transactions per person per day.

As pointed out by another poster, 2.6 TB of transfer quota per month is trivial even by today's standards: anyone can afford that. And should Bitcoin ever scale to those levels it won't be relying on today's resources, it'll be relying on tomorrow's. So your own example falls apart almost immediately.

Also, rather than just guessing what the US population "needs" why not take a look at existing networks? 2000tps is about a fifth of VISA traffic for the whole world. Of course not every transaction goes via VISA, but it should indicate to you that maybe your numbers are once again a bit sketchy.

You can read an article I wrote a long time ago here: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability. It goes over the various ways the system scales up. Performance is unintuitive, there's no substitute for just working it out on the back of an envelope. Bear in mind we live in a world where single websites can generate a large fraction of total internet traffic and not go bankrupt.

What you call "out of circulation" could also just as well be called "savings". By forcing savings to be spent via taxes on them, all you actually do is artificially move spending that would have happened in future into the present day.

This is terrible outcome for two reasons. One is that it results in huge liabilities for future spending - we can see this in the various insolvent pension schemes that are looming on the horizon (e.g. CALPERS which will never catch up to where it needs to be by now).

The second is that the so-called "growth" in the economy that results is in reality merely some arbitrary economic activity: the fact that it took place can be measured, hence growth, but whether it was actually useful or increased societies wealth is harder to measure and often explicitly ignored. If by taxing savings you force people to instead put their money into a housing bubble, that then triggers a construction boom, this appears to central bankers/planners to be successful economic growth whereas in reality it's merely a gross misallocation of resources towards investments that wouldn't normally make any kind of economic sense.

You can't have a printing press controlled by humans and not have it be ultimately end up abused for political purposes. Central bankers are not somehow magically immune from bad decision making just because they're unelected and unaccountable: they are explicitly given their mission by politicians and their mission is economic growth at any cost, even if it means sacrificing long term stability for short term gain: exactly the same thing as the politicians mission.

We can easily see this in recent times, with central banks desperately trying to jack their economies via free money in order to try and solve political problems, like recessions or possible Eurozone breakups. Does this really make long term sense? No - running the printing presses at full speed in order to make something, anything, happen is not a sensible economic policy. Nor is doing so to bail out profligate and badly managed countries to achieve the entirely emotional and political goal of keeping them inside the Eurozone. And indeed Draghi resisted the latter for a long time, but eventually the public pressure being heaped on him daily ("Draghi will destroy the euro" etc) got too much and he caved.

This is why Bitcoin has the most sensible economic policy of all. Long term, it's meant to have no inflation and no deflation. It's meant to provide a stable monetary base. And critically, it's independent of any individuals who will inevitably give into temptation to try and shape things through money creation.