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Wow, do nutrition labels in USA generally not show figures per 100g?

Literally the first sentence:

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.

Consider Dubai. Built by immigrants, used by natives.

Your argument is that it's OK to hurt someone if there's a chance that they might be hurt regardless.

If I were Chinese I'd be feeling pretty damn patronized if someone told me they were taking my iPhone away and I should be happy about it.

This would harm Chinese people. If you lived in China, would you consider an iPhone or a Chinese phone to be more secure against intrusion?

Stupid question: can the glue code not be licensed under both GPL and CCDL?

Clearly ZFS is not a derivative work of Linux and Linux is not a derivative work of ZFS. Only the glue code is in violation (because it derives from both).

That some people are too vain to adopt is not a good enough justification. It is a foundational point of ethics that medical experimentation must be voluntary.

Tell that to WeChat, Alipay et al.

If I buy a grain of sand from you for $10, have I just massively expanded the number of dollars in existence?

Market capitalisations != money.

As I understand it, bitcoin doesn't track coins so much as it tracks the funds associated with account numbers.

It's actually the opposite. The blockchain does track coins, but not accounts or account numbers. Rather, each transaction involves "scripts" which specify some conditions with which coins can be used as inputs to another transaction.

In a normal transaction, one key can spend the coins, but e.g. it is possible to send coins to a script that is impossible to satisfy, therefore the coins are unspendable, yet don't exist in an 'account' at all.

Decaying in more than one way. The JS files on milliondollarhomepage.com start with:

    /*
         FILE ARCHIVED ON 5:47:20 Aug 6, 2015 AND RETRIEVED FROM THE
         INTERNET ARCHIVE ON 20:45:17 Aug 24, 2015.
         JAVASCRIPT APPENDED BY WAYBACK MACHINE, COPYRIGHT INTERNET ARCHIVE.
    
         ALL OTHER CONTENT MAY ALSO BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT (17 U.S.C.
         SECTION 108(a)(3)).
    */

Is it possible that we're fat only because we're eating the wrong kind of sugars?

Nope, we are fat because there are many cheap sources of calories, particularly deep fried foods.

I think by "better" you mean "more properly" ;)

I'm sure IELTS doesn't cover important life skills such as "use of the word innit".

Imagine you go to Ancient Greece and tell them: "in the future there will be a library of over 1 million books and papers containing the knowledge of the world, that any person rich or poor can access from almost anywhere in the world"

Do you think their reaction will be: A) wonder that such a library can exist, or B) to tell you that it is not a library because of the flagrant copyright violations.

Libgen and scihub are among the most amazing products of humanity, that will receive a prominent place in human history. That they are illegal is an almost boring item of trivia.

Although descriptive of the legal situation, I object to the term "pirate library". There is no practical difference between a pirate library and a brick and mortar library, except the larger stock of books online. My local library even has a photocopier.

A library is a place where you can choose a book, and read it for free. That's how it's been for thousands of years. Copyright is a modern intruder and has no right to brand bone fide libraries as "pirate".

It seems to me that large blockchains^ are some of the most stable social structures in existence. The rules of Bitcoin have been in place for 8 years with only minor modifications, despite huge sums of money passing through the system.

This compares very favourably with other social structures, such as nation states, especially 8 year old nation states.

^ Large as in Bitcoin and Ethereum, smaller networks are much easier to manipulate.

In a blockchain, the participants in the network have unlimited authority to modify the "law" of the blockchain, even retroactively.

If there is sufficient consensus among Ethereum users for a hard fork, then it can happen.

Hydroelectric power, like geothermal, is only applicable if the geography permits it. It is also a potential WMD, so you'd better hope the area where you are building your dam is either not near a population center or is (geo)politically stable.

ITER is an almost pointless project, because its design is already outdated even before it has completed. DEMO, if it ever exists, will almost certainly have more in common with ARC than with ITER.

At least in the UK, merchants pay very low fees to process debit card payments, to the extent that some merchants (e.g. budget airlines) do not accept or charge a penalty for using credit cards.

Centralized payment networks will always be cheaper to administer than blockchains.

The only reason that Visa and Mastercard have such high fees is because it's a duopoly.

Anybody who cares about the privacy of their communication can still use an open source stack. So yes it works as a tool for oppression and for catching extremely inept criminals, but it doesn't do much else for national security.

Wait so the name of the website is stored in plain text? So if I want to store my login for gaymidgetporn.com, there will be a file on my computer with that name?

And anything or anybody on my computer can see all the websites for which I have logins just by doing ls ~/.password-store ?

Erm, no thanks.

Article contradicts its own title. WhatsApp is not required to open end-to-end encrypted messages.

Since Devon is in the UK, presumably very few.

The opposite side of that coin is that other programming languages do already exist.

Any new language is already playing catch-up to reach the state of the art. Go is 10 years old and in those 10 years has made astonishingly little progress at implementing basic features such as error handling, because the designers cannot escape their bubble.

The most sensible thing to do is to kill Go, not to improve it. The root problem is not the lack of this or that feature, but the bizarre beliefs of the people running the project.

Electricity is not perfectly fungible because of infrastructure costs and transmission losses.

The nature of mining as a competition for the cheapest electricity means that miners will naturally move towards areas where the electricity is not in demand.

There is no "better" or "worse". The S&P500 is less volatile than Bitcoin, the flip side of that is that historically Bitcoin has appreciated relative to the S&P 500.

Bitcoins are far more practical than an S&P500 ETF. For instance, I can carry bitcoins across a border, whereas if you want to move shares across a border it will involve a lot of paperwork -- if you are a US citizen it may be impossible due to FATCA.

Nvidia have a lot of money, so the law is on their side.

Every source code file is a story. A story with characters, relationships between them, and how the characters behave towards one another. Humans are hardwired to understand the world (and by extension computers) in terms of stories.

The way that programming languages allow us to write these stories is by giving us the opportunity to name things. Naming transforms code from a dumb sequence of instructions, to something that can be understood.

I don't believe non-textual names have any place in programming. I have used Haskell and it is an unmitigated disaster.