Call me paranoid but sounds like they're trying to stop institutions adopting bitcoins as payment to each other otherwise they'll sue? What's the definition of institution anyway? If it's got customers then isn't it the same as a company/business?
Genuine question: Does this mean Btc is not so decentralized after all? Could they possibly decide one day to release an update to exercise ultimate control/power over btc?
It's certainly a point of trust, but ultimately it's the miners who decide how Bitcoin works. So far this has predominantly worked by them using software from bitcoin.org and upgrading it relatively frequently, but this would probably change very quickly once they stop thinking of the bitcoin.org developers as working in their interest.
There are plenty of regular old software engineers in the industry. You don't have to be a math genius or a finance oriented guy. Doesn't mean you'll be trading or working directly with quants, but the amount of code required to make this work end to end is quite large and requires a lot of good software engineers.
Definitely. A bunch of HFTs even post on Who's Hiring here on HN.
It's a rather diverse industry in terms of the type of developers being sought. People with skills ranged from low level hardware design all the way up to Haskell/Scala are pretty constantly in demand.
Where do drones fit into this theory? Using the crudest possible measure - deaths - it's hard not to see the US as the "violent people" you describe. It has become a cycle, how do you suggest breaking it?
I didn't describe anybody in particular. It's interesting to see the way various people here are assigning my statement one way or the other. All I said is that doing the thing that a violence maker wants you to do in exchange for making it stop is usually not the best outcome. Other solutions are exercises left up to the reader.
But it's very context specific:
When I was a school boy, if a bully threatened me with violence and I responded violently to him, he'd probably stop. The better solution would be to figure out why he was a violent bully and solve it there.
As an adult, if somebody told me to give them my wallet at the point of a gun, I'd probably give them my wallet. But the better solution is to figure out what drove some segment of the population to think that mugging people was a good idea and deal with it there - poverty, substance abuse, etc.
People don't become suicide bombers or launch rockets off of drones for no reason, there's always a good reason to do these things even if it's not always obvious. But it may not be the best way to deal with those reasons. In fact, I'd say that it has historically been shown to not be a very good way to deal with those issues.
So is your assumption that drone strikes are deliberately targeting the innocent as a way to inspire terror? If not, isn't it obvious what the difference is?
Do you honestly expect anyone under the age of 25 to understand the geopolitics of having their family, friends, etc being killed and to realize that they were actually "bad" people and that the "proper" reaction is to simply accept the "punishment" of a drone strike?
The difference is obvious to you and me and western folks. But to the average brown kid on the ground seeing his village get blown to pieces, he aint gonna know and he'll be the one sending the bombs when he's a bigger boy. Why not use the drones and send targeted dinners to his table and he'll be a likely friend to the US in the future.
It is causing terror resentment and hatred. I don't think this is the aim though, but I actually don't know. Are aims of the drone controllers know? The linked PDF doesn't doesn't go into this area, but is very interesting. http://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/h...
Funny, I finally took the plunge too just the other day and I'm not a teen. Deleted everything, my whole account, every post, every photo, every tag, every poke, after I downloaded a copy of my stuff of course. But it was not easy task, oh no! They deliberately make it difficult to delete things! The only way is manually one by one, but its worth it. Finally FB free.
My reasons? Well it got really annoying how it turned into a Womans Magazine! Maybe I'm getting to that age when my friends are getting married and having kids, but I'm really not interested in posts of babies, Miley Cyrus BS, Royal Wedding nonsense etc... The list goes on and I only subscribed to reputable news sources like the Times, Guardian.