My brain is a mystery box and random stuff, mostly created by others, streams into it via my nerves on a daily basis and has done for decades. It seems to be effective, at least to me.

It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

Right. AI cars only kill people sometimes, so we should focus on the really serious life-threatening stuff like copyright and DRM. Gotcha.

BJ is a salesman plain and simple. He's charismatic and good at getting people involved. He's both bad at, and uninterested in delivering.

So far, that's fine so long as someone else picks up the idea and delivers.

Brexit is a good example. He oversold what could be done, but crucially he 1) did actually sell it to parliament and the voters and 2) did actually get other people to deliver it - albeit not quite the shiny version he sold.

So, he can get stuff done simply by convincing people to do it - certainly not by doing it himself. That's a genuine skill, if he can deploy it reliably.

I don't find him likable, and don't actually think he's very effective either - but he's not as ineffective as he looks.

Yes, but a human would never mix up the white bodyguard and the black celebrity. The human would look at the clothes, the pose, the expression. If the AI model hasn't included those factors that's a failing of the model designers.

Lightweight naÃve puff piece, contributes nothing to either the engineering nor ethical aspects to the debate.

People tend to believe that any system that improves statistical road safety while maintaining traffic flows will be 'better than humans'. This has a couple of problems:

1. It equates 'current situation' with 'humans'. Road safety has improved hugely year on year without replacing humans, so it's not like having a person in the car caps safety at some constant amount.

2. It assumes people don't care about the cause of harms, only the statistical probability. However, evidence suggests that in fact people do care about cause. A diligent but average heart surgeon has an industry-standard survival rate of 80%. A maverick genius surgeon would have a survival rate of 90%, but he shows up to surgery drunk at least a couple of times a month, so his actual survival rate is 85%. And yet no hospital (and very few patients) would tolerate this genius. He'd be sacked and replaced with a standard surgeon.

The problem is that AI tends to be like the drunk surgeon. Amazingly good when it's working 'as designed' and utterly disastrous when it goes wrong. People tend to find that harder to accept than consistently, predictably OK.

Most European towns over 100k population will easily support shopping and school via walking or trams/busses. Holidays can easily be done with public transport if you are visiting a city (Venice, Paris, Berlin etc) or a resort (Ibiza, Santorini, Chamonix etc). Otherwise, renting a car when you get there isn't hard.

I didn't own a car until I was 30, and only use it a couple of times a month now.

The guy was an eccentric has-been in the mid nineties. I get it, he had a great idea a long time ago, and was stubborn enough to hammer it home. Thanks, GPL was a useful contribution. You've done that RMS, and done bugger all since, so maybe just retire, or try writing useful software or something. Why does anyone want him leading anything?

I hate the cult of personality and celebrity in tech. RMS, Linus, Eric bloody Raymond, Musk. OSS is about the masses organically coming together to make stuff that's basically useful and works. It doesn't benefit from celebrity engineers elevated (especially in their own minds) to God like status.

RMS, quite apart from being creepy and sexist, just isn't all that good at stuff.

Whereas leaders without decorum like Trump are such an improvement.

What is a Linux developer? Someone writing OS level code for Linux? In that case they probably wouldn't care much about MS tools.

But if it's a developer writing applications that just happen to be deployed to Linux - of course they might want to use MS tools, and indeed tools from all sorts of other companies.

Operating systems are really not that important any more. Most of the applications I'm involved in these days target either proprietary non-OS platforms like AWS, or they target frameworks like the JVM or (in my current job) .Net. The OS is of almost no interest. None of the code we write interacts with the filesystem - it's persisting to some serverless layer like Aurora or S3, or else it's talking to a message bus or another network API. All the code needs is RAM, CPU, Network. I care about the OS only slightly more than I care about the BIOS. Operating systems are large clunky annoying things that need patching a lot. The sooner they go away entirely, the better.

I find it mildly depressing that people on Slashdot still rant about MS v Linux. I was interviewing a bunch of recent grads the other day and it's refreshing to see a new generation of developers (25 years younger than me) who aren't saddled with all that pointless history.

I remember when I was 23 listening to old guys going on about RISC v CISC and thinking "you're all mad, this makes no difference to anything". And the same is true of all this systemd shit. It's utterly, deeply, irrelevant to modern software.

No it isn't, it's like saying War and Peace should be translated in English. Or do you believe that only Russian speakers should have access to it, to maintain Tolstoy's artistic integrity? And that non-Russian speakers can just go and read some other book?

English War and Peace is not the same book as the original War and Peace, but it has a great deal in common with it, and is accessible to many more people.

Planescape Torment wasn't very hard to begin with, but an ultra-easy mode would have made the most interesting aspects of the game accessible to more people, and would not have detracted from the experience of those playing the original mode - just as Russian speakers appreciation of Tolstoy is not downgraded by someone translating it into English.

"Recent information is really starting to support the possibility that this virus was bio-engineered. I will post a link at the end."

Absolutely nothing in the link you posted supports the frankly daft hypothesis that this was bio-engineered.

Cards alone aren't especially secure as they can be lost/stolen/borrowed, although they are certainly quick and easy for lower privilege systems.

Hospital IT is certainly complicated, and identity management is more complicated than it is in corporate environments, owing to the large number of applications each staff member has to use, and the issues around confidentiality.

As with most IT problems involving large organisations, the challenges are not especially technical, they are organisational and regulatory.