borgia

I would tend to agree with the author here. I can't see Bitcoin ever emerging as something legal and useful to the average person.

>Bitcoin enthusiasts disagree, claiming illicit activity is practically non-existent. Instead, they preach decentralization, trustlessness and smart contracts - none of which are benefits but merely features.

Bitcoin enthusiasts preach an awful lot of things, particularly preaching about how others should adopt Bitcoin as a currency while they themselves sit on their stacks of it hoping to see its price rise and cash in.

Indeed, it is these Bitcoin "enthusiasts", or more accurately lay speculators, that are likely one of Bitcoin's largest issue. They've turned what was designed to be a currency into an investment/speculation instrument and it's not transcending beyond that because of it, with the exception of people using it for illegal purposes.

So you've two sides to Bitcoin in reality - speculators praying other people adopt it as a currency and those using it for nefarious purposes - both of which are off-putting to any normal person who'd consider using Bitcoin for purchases.

I see no real future for Bitcoin personally. Gambling, perhaps, but even Bitcoin poker at the moment is mainly already skilled, dedicated players using Bitcoin Poker to play since they can't in the US, and that's not going to attract many casual players in itself to create a sustainable ecosystem, nevermind the Bitcoin barriers to getting on to the site in the first place.

That looks very cool.

>Great comment. Anyway I will never leave Europe for US/Canada/Australia[1]. I've visited some family in the latter and I feel that the advantages of these countries are not enough to make me live there. Exchanging peace of mind and a huge decrease of life quality for some extra probabilities of being rich and extra consumption doen't worth IMO.

I'm a European currently living in Canada, who has also traveled the US pretty extensively. The US and Canada aren't really interchangeable. Canada can at times feel like America-lite but in most real ways it's thankfully very different to the US.

I didn't move here because I saw "advantages" regarding personal prosperity, mainly just for the experience. The quality of life here in Toronto isn't a huge difference from what I've experienced in Europe. Comparatively low crime when compared with other major cities on this side of the pond, low poverty, reasonable cost of living relative to IT salaries, etc.

Apart from that, the people are great and really live up to the stereotype and are overall comparatively laid back like in Europe.

What it is lacking though is cultural substance and identity. It's pretty bland. Nothing has any real character. In that way it can feel a bit like a major US city and will be the main reason I move back to Europe in the coming years.

Living and working in the USA is something I'd never consider personally. I'm also approaching 30 and in a few years kids will be along the way, and I would never consider bringing a child up in the US. I don't mean to offend American posters here with this, but what you offer is just not for me, and I could never be a part of something that actively supports the US government and its policies.

But if you were looking for a change I'd suggest giving Canada a shot for a while. It's very different to the other two you've lumped it in with and in great ways and if nothing else it would give you an experience to learn from.

>If there is a killer app suited to the watch form factor, it hasn't made itself known yet, and it may not exist

The only "killer" feature I could see a smartwatch offering is way down the line when smart cars are around i.e. being able to lock/unlock your car from your wrist, locate it in a carpark easily with your wrist, get notifications if it's being stolen direct to your wrist or, being able to start/stop the ignition from your wrist, etc.

That would be convenient. No more keys and you wouldn't have to pull out your phone to carry out these basic operations. Further down the line, I can see something like being able to tap your wrist and your self-driving car starts itself, unparks itself and comes to your location being a super use for it.

But these are quite a way off and even then the cars with these technologies will be far too expensive for the average person currently eyeing up a smartwatch.

"Your phone is ruining your life"...so here's a gadget you can wear on your wrist that will connect to it and deliver you the same notifications your phone does, only on your wrist.

No, phones aren't ruining people's lives. People are ruining people's lives. Companies demanding that employees be accessible all day every day, inside and outside of the office, is ruining some people's lives. Their phones are merely a tool for some people to ruin other people's lives with and that issue is not resolved by moving the notification delivery to one's wrist.

I am an average person, I'm not bombarded with notifications. I get messages from my girlfriend fairly regularly, some texts from friends, and email that is at best not urgent, and worst just junk packaged up in a more pretty manner that I've somehow not unsubscribed from.

I can't help but see smartwatches as a fad gadget with no longevity and I'm struggling to see a real use case for them. The big focus is on "Health". Omg, you can track how many steps you've taken today?! Or your heartbeat?! Wow, that's going to make me turn around and get my life in order, right?!

Well, the (presumably) massive amount of Fitbits and other wearable fitness trackers abandoned on people's shelves would indicate otherwise. Ok, a small percentage of people will actually use these things regularly, but for most they're a fad that will inevitably sit on a shelf gathering dust as is what happens with the vast majority of sports equipment bought by non-sportspeople.

I don't need to be able to access the weather forecast at a moment's notice, I can look out the window and get a good idea, or I can check out accuweather in the morning and see what they reckon is coming our way for the day.

Maybe I'm just becoming more cynical as I'm getting older (and I'm not old, I'm only approaching 30), but mainstream technology seems to be delivering very little substance these days and a whole lot of trendy, heavily marketed nonsense.

Do I need email on my wrist? No. Whatsapp messages? No. The weather forecast? No. Facebook notifications? Absolutely not. My fitness tracked? No, not really and I'm not going to delude myself into thinking strapping something to my wrist will drastically change my habits.

So what do I want on my wrist? Something that will tell me the time instantly without having to fish out my phone, that will look well as a style accessory and that won't run out of battery within a day if I decide to look at the time more frequently and none of these smartwatches deliver any of that without making large tradeoffs on looks or battery life.

Iphone killer? Certainly not. Even if an Apple Watch could work totally independently, the screen/the medium is not conductive to actually doing anything on it like sending a message or an email.

Let's call it what it is - a fad gadget whose sales will be a testament to its marketing and not due to the value it delivers its users.

> Should the US be surprised when China enacts similar legislation?

I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama label such an act by China as an "act of war".

>Combined with the existing surveillance dragnet, that's horrifying.

The cruel creep of tyranny. "Cyber-terrorism" is the new bogeyman, or the new "terrorism" but instead of using a real catastrophe like 9/11, the incident they're going to use to justify this is a "hack" on Sony pictures with probably the weakest links to North Korea that could be?

There was no proof issued that North Korea were behind that attack. All the evidence that came out of it made it look as though they almost certainly were not behind it. So instead we're just going to repeat it as fact until it's accepted as true?

This is horrifying but it's just another turd thrown onto the pile of horrifying things the powers in the US are doing now.

Without even touching the USA's utterly toxic foreign policy:

- NSA mass surveillance that has eroded everyone's privacy on any communication device they may own, stomping on their own people's 4th Amendment rights in doing so.

- NSA lying barefaced to congress and facing no punishment

- CIA overthrowing or attempting to overthrow governments in sovereign countries who aren't explicitly under the thumb of the USA, throwing these countries into disarray

- CIA torturing untried suspects in the most brutal ways that we've seen in modern times.

- CIA arming and training "rebels" abroad who've went on to cause absolute atrocities across the middle east.

- Creating a militarized police force in the USA despite violent crimes decreasing year on year. Hell, the NYPD wanted portable, mounted machine guns to deal with protestors!

- Supporting a police policy of no-knock raids which have lead to the deaths of an unfortunate number of totally innocent people, over nothing.

- Rallied against whistleblowers while at the same time claiming to be working toward transparency and support for whistleblowers.

The list just goes on and on.

I utterly loathe online social networks / social networking. They've become a showcase for society's worst and little more.

Great for people who want to sell you something, or push a political ideology on you, or whore attention for themselves but totally devoid of any actual substance.

I've given them their fair shot. I keep a FB account to occasionally touch base with friends back home and that's it. Twitter is a joke and I wish it the worst. The rest aren't even worth mentioning.

Regarding your question about French, I'm not too sure. There/their/they're would be la/leur/ils sont, so perhaps there's scope for the first two to become conflated, not so much the last.

As far as I know the biggest issue French is facing is the injection of English words where there isn't a French equivalent.

Then again, French people seem to absolutely loathe the version of French spoken in Quebec so there could be a plethora of other issues involved that we don't have in English.

Regarding your second point, personally I'm not sure but ignorance certainly plays its part one way or another.

I think you're confusing the TPP for the TTIP?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investm...

Both appear to be utterly toxic.

I'm of two minds about this. Periscope, and indeed any other publicly social media, is an opt-in service. By using it you're saying "I want attention | I want to draw attention to myself | I want to draw attention to something". By publicly social media I mean publicly accessible Twitter accounts and similar, not private Facebook accounts.

People in the "public eye" invariably draw positive and negative attention. Does what amounts to narcissism need to be further coddled by essentially automatically filtering out negativity?

I understand that the tool could do with some work for private/family/friend only streaming or similar, but if you're going to put yourself out into the public forefront you should be able to take the good with the bad.

Cyberbullying is rampant, it's a big issue, but it's not a technology issue. The issue is with the people using it. For every kid that's experiencing cyberbullying there's another kid on the opposite end bullying them online. Let's stop trying to push responsibility onto the platform provider and instead focus on the people involved.

>Linguistic purity movements continue to strike me as largely pointless. It seems better that language evolve naturally -- as long as it remains effective as a communication medium, what is the issue?

On the one hand I agree with you. The English we use now, even when written or spoken in a grammatically perfect way, is very different to the English used a couple of hundred years ago.

On the other hand, seeing "your/you're" or "they're/their/there" used incorrectly or interchangeably rustles my jimmies immeasurably.

>not sure why they keep doing this

Because it gets them attention.

Personally I find it irritating.

/Buzz Killington

There's many of those things I'm desperately hoping are simply April Fool's jokes.

I've been wanting to get into nodejs but haven't touched javascript in years and have been put off by the hassle of having to go through it again tbh.

I used Meteor a number of times a few years ago and was totally blown away by it. Utterly fantastic.

Then went down the route of working in enterprise java for a few years and now, trying to get into full stack javascript based development, I feel totally swamped.

I've a tough time believing they're having difficulties recruiting. Nothing has come from the Snowden leaks. Half of America has been very effectively turned against the guy. The rest don't care.

There's also no shortage of the morally bankrupt or patriotically brainwashed.

I don't know how those working with these entities can sleep at night knowing they're working to wreak havoc on their fellow American and further condemn their children and their children's children to a life under an oligarchy that listens to their every word.

>Analysts are just doing their job and one certainly can't blame them.

Yes, you can blame them and you can blame them very easily. This is a ridiculous argument.

>If readers were willing to pay for good journalism, they would receive some.

This is it. Tech journalism is a cesspit of clickbait, hysteria and social justice nonsense because nobody is paying for it and this appeal to the lowest-common-denominator of clicks brings in money.

But then nobody is going to be willing to pay these entities for the content they're using to current bring in revenue.

>Until we can legislate that servers make at least $7.25/hr nationwide, no amount of technology is going to move us in that regard.

Even with generous minimum wages, tip culture has crept into Western Europe pretty rapidly. It's more than just a wage technicality that has to change to overcome or dismantle the established tipping culture.

I really, really like the idea of being able to just get up and walk out of a restaurant or bar without having to deal with money though. That said, so long as tips remain expected you're going to come across as a jerk if you don't leave something and it'll likely be remembered for the next time you visit.

>Tipping is expected no matter what in the US. There is no incentive to do better here either.

It is expected, yes, but as a European with vast experience in customer service on both sides of the pond, even with expected tips the level of service in US restaurants/bars/etc. is far, far higher than what I'm accustomed to in Europe.

Now it can sometimes be overbearing but overall the experience is generally more welcoming, more friendly and more personal. When I'm eating in an up-scale place in Europe, the staff are generally very professional and quite quiet. Lower down the scale the staff are just "meh".

In the US, even if you go into a chain restaurant at rush hour I've found the staff to be totally engaging, eager to have a chat, find out what you like, recommend you things and then check up on you to see if everything is alright.

That's not to say that it's always great service in US and always mediocre in Europe, but there's definitely an overall different feel to the level of service offered regardless of a tip being expected.

>I am from Denmark. 10 years ago tipping was only something you saw in movies. Today some places are trying it and they ask upfront "Do you want to leave a tip?". It seems so forced and wrong. It just makes the whole experience end in on weird note.

This is so weird. I'm European and last lived in Ireland for quite a few years. When I first got there tipping was basically not a done thing, at all, and then it started to creep in. When I left last year it had somehow become the standard in restaurants, etc.

It has crept into Europe from the US but without the conditions that made tipping necessary in the US and the customer service experience you get in Europe, despite the tipping culture having now been seemingly normalised, you do not get anything near the level of customer service experience you get in the US.

I'm a software engineer, people don't tip me for making good software, it's what is expected of me. When I was in college I worked in various retail positions. People did not tip me there because providing good customer service was expected of me. So why, when there is a decent minimum wage in place, are waiting staff somehow different?

It's incredibly frustrating.

And the Mohammed simulator that involved goats made by someone on 4chan...

I fundamentally disagree with this, and its implementation seems to be a significant attack on dual income, middle class families who are doing well for themselves.

This doesn't hit the rich, it hits the middle earner and it hits them extremely hard. It's frankly pathetic but I suppose what can you expect in an era of hard pressed populist socialism.

>They're already having to bury/censor threads concerning this case at reddit, her new company.

They don't have to bury or censor them, they're just actively doing it and have been since the trial began. Anything related to Ellen or her husband generally got deleted fairly rapidly or hidden from being searchable.

In any case, the community at Reddit seem to absolutely despise her and with a Reddit staff member apparently offering to testify against her at the trial, I would be surprised if she were kept around much longer.

>I don't think Race or Gender matters and I would not want to work somewhere where it does.

Unfortunately we work in an industry whereby the mainstream industry media very highly believes race and gender matter, and that the presence of too "many" of a certain race or gender is "problematic".

>That article isn't trying to remain impartial at all.

I have not seen one single article on this trial that hasn't been very heavily biased in favour of Ellen Pao. Not one.

I'm not surprised this isn't the case yet again. The media are calling this institutional misogyny regardless of the facts or the judgement by the jury. If she wins, it's institutional misogyny, if she loses it's institutional misogyny.

At this stage I'm convinced that tech journalism is the lowest form of journalism available today.

Was the sound flaky for anyone else? It was pretty erratic for me on Firefox on OSX

>However, it's only recently that we have developed tools that make it possible for one person (e.g. Snowden) to undo billions of dollars of secrecy by leaking more documents that one could physically carry if they had been printed on paper, then distributing them to millions at zero cost.

I've often wondered what has been said, or what kind of policies have been changed, or implemented, etc. in the NSA since Snowden came to the public forefront.

I wonder what they've done internally to try to ensure that this doesn't happen them again.

>Outside of the UK, the EU at least pretends to be outraged.

And in a glaring act of hypocrisy, David Cameron came out yesterday to extoll how upset he was over the ruling that the lobbying letters Prince Charles sent government members had to be published. What a breach of privacy it was. Can nobody communicate privately anymore?!