forgottenpaswrd

Wow, what a arrogant statement!

Instead of acknowledging that you don't know what you are talking about, you act like you know it all, and doing so makes you look like a fool for anyone that knows a little about the topic.

I had sent-received money from South American or African countries in Bitcoins, and they are super useful.

Countries like Venezuela, Argentina, or Colombia or countries from Africa will tax you more than 50% of everything that is sent via official channels, if they let you do this in the first place, which they wont. All the money goes to corrupt governments.

With BT not such problems.

As someone who has travel something around the world I would say yes, they control what you see and hear, and doing so they control what you feel and think.

If I want to make you angry or terrorize I could display on TV some images and you will feel like I desire(Boston Marathon killed less people than the number of dead people in Irak or traffic accidents in any city in a week).

Do you believe that North Koreans think they are not free? or Chinese by the way?

Most of US media is controlled by a few, and people (specially in the States) watch TV more than talk with their friends.

In Europe you see the same but within each country with dominant language(German, Spanish, French, Russian...).

They all believe they live in the best country in the world, while they actually don't know other countries.

It looks like there is software in DNA, not just firmware. We are just starting to understand that gene expression is very important too, code that express(is executed) or not based on the environment, and that junk DNA is probably "not understood code" .

The iOS and Android part is privative. There are open source approaches to do the same, but they don't share code, and use different technology, as far as I remember, the Open source one uses Dalvik while the other not in Android for example.

Well, you should not seat for long periods of time.

If you do you train your body, the same way that if you look just with one eye you modify the eye you don't use, you modify your spine if you seat or use heels for long periods of time.

A good chiropractic professional could read your body in an amazing way.

Once you have modified your body by use, being "comfortable" is not the same as "healthy". Smoking is comfortable for a smoker, taking drugs is comfortable for a drug addict and covering one eye is more comfortable than using it once you have used only the other for a long time.

"This is what software crackers and antivirus writers do on a regular basis. For an enlightening write-up, see the Symantec paper(s) on Stuxnet."

Well, not really.

I was both software cracker and virus writer myself(just for fun, we never distributed our virus or our cracks, keygens and stuff outside).

I was part of a larger group doing it. I had contacts with people that became famous for breaking several important protections, specially for games.

You have no idea how big software is. A million lines of code is impossible to read by any human being in his entire life. Yes, there are automatic tools and great disassemblers like IDA pro, but even if you were to see the entire source code, it is very easy to hide some flaw into the code.

If you add undocumented hardware into the equation, then it is very hard to disassemble without significant resources.

This hardware took dozens of millions of dollars to develop, hundreds of very smart people to design, with all the documentation. It will take at least an order of magnitude more to decode not having that info.

Hi Derek.

You know me by my real name. We talked in the past. I use a pseudonym so what I write here is not affected by my name and I have better feedback or just go unnoticed(just your name alone could make all the responses negative or positive).

As you already know, what someone who has traveled the world* considers "normal" is very different from what the rest of the world does. You just understand how much you know when just talking with normal people and you see how less they know.

Remember the Parable of the talents, how fear could immobilize, fear of not doing good enough work.

What I would do is to start writing, not caring about publishing or not, you don't need fear. Then ideas will come and you will be astonished how much things live in your head.

Greetings!

*Or lived in a circus, by the way.

I read c or assembler code like I read a newspaper, but comments are needed even in my own code to understand the higher lever design.

"But the United States (like every other country in the world) needs some intelligence-gathering capabilities."

But the United States(like every other country of the world) needs control by the people who supposedly controls the country in a democracy.

If all the people is spied, and the people has no way of controlling it, then it is not a democracy anymore.

Remember that absolute power is way more dangerous than terrorists. Terrorist killed 3000 people in 9-11, Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot killed tens of millions after taking control of the State.

Remember Hitler took control of an advanced democratic republic with the excuse of going after terrorism.

Medical prices are so outrageous in the US that, in theory, the medical business is a good field for startup disruption.

Real disruption, not showing prices on a page but having actual good doctors at a good price.

There is a monopoly today controlled by few.

words, just words.

It is not that complex, it is called "End the Patriot Act" or lobby for that. Until just telling your customer that they are being watched is against the law and they could go to jail for that, nobody should trust ANY American corporation.

And no, not all countries in the world have this kind of totalitarian laws. Yes, companies could give info about you to the government, but under court order, and those are public or private only for a small amount of time.

That's NASCAR, not F1.

In F1 you see real cars, doing real curves, not the thing NASCAR does like having a car that only could turn one way.

In F1 you see cars going through the streets of Monaco or Valencia, or German circuits that you could race yourself with your own car. BTW I do it.

One of the things we train any newcomer to our company is to never do what this man does:a complex single line with expected behavior based on your (arbitrary) conventions.

Yo always do multiple lines, with comments on each one.

It sounds ridiculous, but this simple thing made some kind of bugs impossible: those that you have in front of you but you can't see in a million years. The atomic operation in code is the line, you can't debug a complex line(1).

It is painful forcing people to do that, people use to hate being told what to do, but at the same time they love the outcome so much. In the end everybody loves it.

1.With assembly you are debugging an instance of your code. You are not debugging what will be created with any compiler, any os or architecture.

It depends on what you define "pretty successful".

If you come from an American point of view, then success = money and nothing else. In America you need lots of money for everything, just giving a good education for your kids is 10 to 15 times more expensive than in Europe or Asia, same with health care.

But on other countries success is defined differently, like having a good relationship with your family and friends.

I know quite a few very rich people, and some of them are as miserable or more miserable as people without money. With broken families, no real friends, and no time for living outside work. With women or men around them that just want their money and will do anything to get it.

I really love this article.

In practice a good strategy for companies is reduce unknown to a minimum, the Steve Jobs strategy, just focusing on very few products, with each having the less complexity possible(simplify and simplify).

Only focusing on very few products you could make perfection possible, estimates will be off, they always are when there is unknown, but at least completion will be finite (you will complete it!, which is number one issue with research work for example).

Sounds simple, but is really hard, leaving creative people on their own is dangerous for this reason, they could start new projects, not finishing anything.

Well, don't worry , the NSA is a 50 billion industry itself. So you could always work for the government as Obama wants.

"It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person."

It is called disguised communism. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The redistributors redistribute to their friends and family first, then on their party, and then the rest so now you have people living really well, most people living bad, like today, but with no connection between generating wealth and being rewarded by it at all.

Don't let me wrong, this works, for a while. Until you get to consume all the savings of the productive society. And nobody wants to work anymore. Then societies collapse(Venezuela has 40% inflation per month now, Cuba, URSS)

Some of my family members come from communist countries. I don't want some political commissar to decide who deserve what and who doesn't.

I believe in distributed power, not centralized authority. Technology is making distributed power efficient again, with computers in every pocket and inexpensive 3d printers, laser cutters and CNC mills. Ironically we are supporting too centralized, too big to fail business.

No, not really.

About being too complex to be controlled, yes maybe, but there is very good people controlling complexity.

I know lots of entrepreneurs, as I am one myself.

The best entrepreneurs will learn from other people. Take for example Steve Jobs, he was not born knowing it all, he had fckng Robert Noyce as mentor, and all his life was spent learning from the best he could, like Polaroid inventor or Sony founder.(every year he will take 100 people from his company to learn from)

No matter were you are, there is always someone 10 to 20 years over you on a topic, and the best thing you could do is learn from them instead of thinking you are inventing gunpowder(Spanish expression that means you are inventing something revolutionary nobody knows about).

I personally know a man called Warren Buffet. This man, who is super rich old(normal old people believe they know it all) and famous will cold call you if he is interested in something you do for please explain it to him, and then he will start asking you deep questions about your business like crazy and if you ask him, he would do the same for you for anything you ask. This man has amazing amounts of valuable knowledge. In public he could not say what he really things because his word alone is capable of making markets go up or down.

Successful people do something called "masterminding", that is very similar to "pay it forward" in Silicon Valley. They learn form each other what works and what does not. They do it officially or by networking and just talking.

"Version 3.0 was going to up the graphical ante with an exciting new 3D beveled design (which had first appeared with OS/2 1.2)"

I think it was Next computers who got first on this.

When you do business with the US, you see it very clearly: The US is a world on their own. So big that they don't need to establish connections as they already have the connections between their States, some of them(most of them) bigger than Chile or New Zealand.

I agree and I had my remark down voted, you know it by the number of suicides.

We pay a price for living with terrible weather, with no sun light half of the year, where you can't get out of buildings because it is so freezing cold.

I would say what you see in places like Costa Rica(pura vida!!) is genuine happiness because people need much more the Sun and friendships for being happy than a Ferrari or whatever we could buy.

Yes.

The article talks about the fact, I create an hypothesis about the reason.

When you travel the world you see there is a correspondence between seriousness and weather. You go to Brasil and the South is way more serious than the North. In Europe-North America it is the opposite, as they are in a different hemisphere.

I would say it is the terrible weather, too cold in winter, too hot in summer. It probably means something like "serious people are the rulers, because if you do stupid crazy things you are dead" over thousands of years that forge a culture.

Russia is so big, and yet so ugly. I took the transsiberian train and it was so boring. In 40kms of Chile you see more than in 3000 of transsiberian. In Winter there is no light, and no color(snow everywhere).

When you travel to places where the sun shines all year long you find that everybody smiles so much. You go to Bali, Brazil, Cuba, Costa Rica, kenia, Nigeria, all people smile all the time.

Boston, New York,Seattle, Germany, they are in the middle-upper scale of seriousness. Miami, California, less serious.

Looks like a copy of Ultimaker's cura(which is opensource) combined with a copy of thingiverse integrated in the same program.

This is what MS does best, copying someone else idea that already works, and putting money onto it.

It seems that MS is going to put some hundred millions into this as they realized this is the future.

"Nice straw-man. Unity 3D does WORA very, very well. It's been used successfully for cross-platform development by many shipped products. To my initial astonishment, all built on Mono/C#."

Not true. Unity engine is made using c/c++. You control those components using Mono/c#, which is totally different.

If Unity was made in Mono, it would be 1 frame per second. We made lots of experiments using mono for doing 3d and animation in our company as it is fast to program with, but with all the market machine of MS, c# is not designed for some things, but some people just can't stop trying to use the only hammer they have.

"That they are the most carbon efficient doesnt mean it couldnt be improved/replaced in the future however."

The fact that transporting things by sea is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more efficient means that it is the last thing to improve-replace.

"I just find it funny how politicians in my country try to save carbon emissions by enforcing a speed limit on highways or only let newer cars into the city areas...it just doesnt make no difference at all on a global scale."

Politicians use to be ignorant of science. Having said that, cars and trucks are the biggest polluter in the world.

I couldn't care less about "carbon emissions", but combustion particles, specially diesel from big truck, are really nasty for the environment.

Dear Nobody:

There are two kinds of people: people that do things(good or bad) and people that don't.

People that don't do anything love to criticize those that do. You will find them criticizing how bad other person dances in a party, but of course you won't find them dancing as is risky for them.

Well, yes, facebook sucks, but as the most important social network on earth, they suck less than the alternatives. If you have a better idea you are free to do something about it.

Wow, I find it amazing how hard is for him to apologize for the "tea party" remark.

It took him almost a month, then he uses another person's mistake as an example, and then in a small remark at the end, he apologizes.

I guess it is "better late than never". But it speaks about how little social skills some geeks have(he was programmer before billionaire).

No, it is not. Nor it should be.

Economist call their discipline "social science" basically because they suffer from "science envy". They want to believe that there are simple things like "water molecule is the bonding of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen". But in economy they are not, as economy is about the most flexible thing on Earth, humans and the relationship between them.

Economy is about dogma, there are Keynesians dogma followers(that look like never read a book of Keynes), Austrian dogma followers, and so on. Nothing to do with science but with power grabbing. Today all institutions are dominated by keynesians ands as everybody can see they are making the world a worse place.

Today "Defense Budget" is an euphemism, it should be called "Attack Budget", or "Ministry of War" budget, like it was in the past.

US is today the main aggressor in the world, what China an Russia are doing by economic treaties, the US is using force alone. Afganistan, Iraq, Libia, Siria.

US is trying to force people in the world to keep using the petrodollar, but they had abused so much their power(printing it like crazy and exporting inflation and poverty to other countries), that the rest of the world is looking for alternatives, and they will find them.

All empires try to sustain past glories by force, from the Spanish empire in Nederlands to British Empire in India, Germany(France) and Japan(in China) before WWII. But empires come and go.