I also wonder what percentage of the "hoarded currency" is actually currency that has been destroyed and if it will have any long term consequences. For example, in the early days of Bitcoin I mined a few blocks with an old laptop. The computer eventually died without any backup of my wallet thereby destroying the those Bitcoins. There doesn't appear to be anyway for anyone to know whether I am simply hoarding those Bitcoins to dump on the market at a later date or if they have been permanently removed from the money supply.
I'm in the same boat. I played around with BitCoin in the early days and never really cared for the coins I earned. I wiped the machine I used and only recently realized they were gone forever. Apparently I just flushed a few hundred bucks, meh.
> There doesn't appear to be anyway for anyone to know whether I am simply hoarding those Bitcoins to dump on the market at a later date or if they have been permanently removed from the money supply.
Yeah, this is the big problem with the papers or blog posts pointing out how many coins are not moving around and then insinuating that Bitcoin is a scam or that it will soon be destroyed as an old miner dumps a few hundred thousand coins: for most of them, the parsimonious explanation for them not moving is simply that they've been lost. But there's no way to prove this! Did Satoshi wipe his hard drive when he moved on to other 'projects'? We have no way of knowing.
(There apparently are ways to verifiably destroy bitcoins - send them to impossible addresses or something like that - but I haven't heard that anyone has bothered doing that and this wouldn't apply to people losing coins accidentally or apathetically.)
If a few blocks is 3 or 4, you might want to keep that HD around. Could be worth sending it to a professional data recovery firm and having the platters removed etc.
Another way to attack a similar set of problems is through the new bundling and minification settings in .Net 4.5[1]. It doesn't address everything, for example you need to know and account for the dependencies yourself. However, my early experiences with using it have been very positive.
Anyone who would say that hasn't been paying attention. Not only had innovation on Reader slowed to a halt, but Google was also working on and prioritizing products that competed with it (G+). There is a reason why Feedly was able to move so quickly on replacing the Google Reader API, they were anticipating the shutdown of Reader for a while.
It is a lot easier for people to protest by not doing anything than actually putting effort into it. Switching from Gmail to some other provider involves a lot of friction. Not using a newly released product (assuming this will be one) is fairly easy.
This is an oversimplification and the type of thinking that gets IT labeled as nothing more than a business cost center. IT shouldn't just be limited to preventing downtime and making sure things continue to work. It should also be focused on making employees more productive. You might say allowing Chrome cost the company $6 million due to downtime, but are you factoring in the potential losses from having a more draconian IT policy. For example, how much more productive would employees be if they could automate part of their normal workload with a good browser extension or how does a more employee focused IT policy alter employee moral and in turn employee retention?
Of course I was oversimplifying, and of course any good IT department recognises that that its job is to help other people do theirs. I did start by acknowledging joelthelion's point, and I have no problem with the idea that someone who has a genuine business need to do something outside the normal rules should be able to request a reasonable exception to whatever general policies might apply.
However, you need an awful lot of indirect benefit to make up for one screw-up that breaches corporate security, particularly if you work in a regulated industry like healthcare or finance. Lawyers and industry regulators don't care about any goodwill you got from letting Bob bring his own laptop to work if Bob's laptop was subsequently left on a train opening access to thousands of customers' medical records or credit card details. You could probably have fired Bob and hired an entire team of other people who didn't care about using their own laptop with the money you're instead paying as a fine for that one, though perhaps not so much if the business collapses due to the adverse PR and an executive or two gets thrown in jail for negligence.
A job seems like the last thing I would want to leave up to be "sold to the highest bidder." From an employee's perspective there are so many other factors outside of compensation that are relevant to whether I would want to work somewhere. From an employer's perspective if you are hiring mercenaries willing to work for the highest bidder, what do you do when company X is willing to pay more than you can afford?
The bids aren't binding. You still interview and both parties have to say yes. The auction is simply for what your starting salary would be if the interview goes well.
it's not about "highest bidder" - it's about efficiency and transparency.. in two weeks, developers have 5-20 detailed offers to pick from, and can then choose where to interview based on what companies look interesting, with all things considered. we're considering new names right now that make this clearer :)
Forgive me, I hadn't heard of the company before this article. The name suggests and the article flatly states that the developer is "sold to the highest bidder." If there is really nothing binding about the bids and the highest bidder doesn't necessarily end up with the candidate, is this a relatively standard recruiting website that puts an early emphasis on a position's salary?
Which is one of the reason those degrees are viewed as less valuable than a similar degree from a more prestigious institution which is assumed to have higher (teaching/admission/grading) standards. That is still the biggest obstacle for non-traditional education. How do you assess the value of the degree and then communicate that value to others?
The problem is that people expect more from Google. People understand the conference is popular and so should Google. If anyone could handle this type of load, you would think they would be near the top of the list. However, every year people need to sit at their computer staring at animated gif or rapidly hitting F5. Even when you get past the first screen and are told that you have tickets waiting for you, the payment processing often fails. That is exceptionally frustrating.
Of course there are. The faecal matter (e.g. from egg shells, as described in the article) can be transferred onto hands, and from there onto clothing. The person then hops on a plane, flies to UK and goes for a stroll around British countryside, where they come into contact with some chickens.
This is contrived, admittedly, but not implausible. There are other scenarios as well. While they may all seem very unlikely, eventually contamination will occur, given how often people fly back and forth nowadays. If you keep rolling a thousand dice, eventually they will all come up sixes.
> "If you keep rolling a thousand dice, eventually they will all come up sixes"
A thousand sixes in a single simultaneous roll shouldn't happen in the entire lifetime of the universe. If your system is that safe, you're in pretty good shape. But rolling a thousand dice where you get to set aside each six you get, you should expect to get to all sixes in 30 or 40 rolls.
Whenever you're engineering a system for safety, the key is figuring out how much needs to go wrong for the system to fail, and how many opportunities you'll have for those things to go wrong. Diseases being carried from continent to continent is a fairly normal occurrence; contamination will happen fairly regularly, and the biggest protection against it becoming widespread is herd immunity.
Yes, true. My thousand dice comment was intended in vein of "if you put a thousand monkeys with typewriters in a room...". I did not mean to imply that the probability of rolling a thousand sixes is similar to the probability of contamination.
I'm assuming pretty much every other egg laying bird has the disease, even many egg laying reptiles (keeping snakes out of the chickens house is never any fun).
There was a big salmonella problem with ducks in the UK many years ago (1930s?) so people switched to eating hens eggs instead. Clearly the problem was much bigger in mass production, as then hens got it. So I think actually most birds do not have it normally.
Until the value of Bitcoin is more stable and technology illiterate people start to use it, there is no way that something like this can replace PayPal.
Paypal is also an entity with a head office, where the people involved in creating it are widely known. Although you might disagree with their policies or ethics, at least they're a legitimate concern.
Bitcoin was created by "some guy" that, if anybody knows them, nobody's talking. Illegal, underground money lenders are more above-board than this.
