This is good advice to live by!

I learned the hard way that mybitcoin are a joke when I lost my password and discovered that there's no way to reset it or even contact them without creating a new account. Even if you do create a new password and contact them, they're unlikely to actually respond.

Thankfully it only cost me 1BTC to find this out.

Ages are natural numbers by convention, nobody is ever 30.00000001 years old. 28-30 is another way of saying 28<=n<=30, not 28<n<30 nor 28<n<=30.

Thank you. I have absolutely no problem with either of your statements, I can't vouch for how true they are (depends entirely on who they cock things up for!) but I still think that the linked article is incredibly hard to take seriously. Cultist tricks like the redefinition of the words "true" and "law" serve to add artificial authority to whatever opinion is being pushed; it's emotive, intellectually dishonest and only works in circle-jerks. People parading around claiming to be the Truth^TM, Light^TM or The One True Way^TM are not people you should be taking seriously, even if you share beliefs with them.

Sounds really interesting. A few questions though:

1) What happens if I lose my smartcard? Is it just my GPG key and passphrase in there?
2) My computer is always on. Can the software be set to launch secure storage when the card is inserted?
3) My laptop doesn't have a card reader, are there USB key options available?

Neal Stephenson maybe? (author of Cryptonomicon)

There's no need. My argument is about the use of the word "law" to describe an opinion. Newton's inverse square law describes how classical gravity works, there is no law of "you should keep heavy things that will fall on the ground" because that's an opinion.

See the difference? Laws don't describe how things ought to be, they describe how things are. Words mean things.

If you want to start it manually via ssh, press ctrl+z to suspend the process, then type bg to resume it in the background. Finally disown to detach the background process from the shell, then you can safely disconnect your ssh session.

But yeah, running it on startup via cron is the best way. Run crontab -e as the user you want to run bitcoind as and add an @reboot line. See man cron for more info.

It's an opinion, maybe it's a strong opinion informed by evidence. Maybe even if you had seen many instances of states having control of the money supply and cocking it up, and others being in control of the money supply and not cocking it up, you'd have a working hypothesis. If that hypothesis had been formalized and tested many many times but never disproved, not once, and everyone accepted it as fact, THEN you could call it a law. But that statement would still be an opinion informed by a law, not a law in itself.

tl;dr You can't just pull opinion out of your ass and say it's a law, unless you've got absolutely no credibility or self-respect.

Wut? How is "the State should never have control of the money supply" not a "law" that is made up?

The laws of gravity are discovered. Political ideologies, no matter whether you are for them or against them are made up bullshit to do with humans interacting. How can anyone who uses the word "law" to mean anything other than a natural law or a piece of legislation be taken seriously?

Am I missing something here?

@antares, now I may be drunk and this may be offensive, but you're talking bollocks. I don't want to have to search the web to know how to use a piece of software, it should just work. If the user interface of some software requires searching the web before you can use it, then it quite simply fails at its job of interfacing with the user!

If the key audience is a technical elite like you are suggesting, then there should be compile instructions rather than binaries on the main website. I'd be quite happy with that, but that's not the case.

I know what HTML is, I was just struggling to think of a GUI toolkit that designers find easy to use, that is cross platform, user-friendly, mature and suited to rapid development. HTML ticks all of those boxes, in fact Windows 8 will use HTML and JavaScript for client-side apps.

The Win32 API and Cocoa are reasonably lightweight, but not cross-platform. GTK, .Net, QT and Java have enormous dependencies and are a ball-ache to just jump in and start developing for. WebKit is tiny but has loads of Apple's dependencies, Mozilla have a very ugly build process.

CEGUI and Irrlicht are nice and small, but not very flexible. A small, lightweight, cross-platform HTML4 rendering library with minimal dependencies (zlib, opengl and libpng) would solve a lot of problems in this space. For example we wouldn't need a 10MB download for the Bitcoin client, and the same code could be used across mobile devices with constrained memory.

This is technological elitism and a very short-sighted, ignorant view of the world. Either we have a GUI client or we don't, if you don't want a user-friendly UI then stick to the command line.

Started as an anarchist, slowly became a socialist and eventually a pragmatist. Politics is an abstract space that can be explored infinitely in all directions, there is no ultimate truth or correct way, only what is useful and what is not.

Slightly off-topic, but are there any HTML rendering toolkits that are incredibly lightweight, cross platform and with minimal dependencies? Given all the progress made in the web over the past decade, it may be better to just go ahead and write apps in HTML as they're very flexible and well known by users. A desktop app that looks and feels web 2.0 would be rather nice IMO.

I expected Dr Rodney McKay to explain how it worked.

I don't think anyone denies that subjective experience exists, but the basic premise of a soul is that it is something separate from the body. Soul is a loaded word that dualists see no problem with and everyone else dislikes

Yeah I agree, but not because they're toy-ish but because they deviate from the standards that users expect. The example you gave is bad because of the background, wasted space, layout, tabs and buttons not looking like what users expect and the general clutter of it. Good design is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.

To paraphrase Donald Norman, as little knowledge of how to use the object as possible should be held in the head, it should exist in the "world" (in this case the UI). A good UI design is split into categories to reduce clutter thus preventing the need to memorize actions and locations (knowledge in the head), each item should use metaphor (icons to represent real-world items, pushables "sticking out", draggables that look like they can be grabbed) and logical mappings (sorting a list is done via its column header, use of colours to signify categories) to draw on knowledge that people already have and make things obvious. When there's no other option, use standards; *most* people know how to operate a drop-down list or combo-box because they've used loads of them before.

The problem with programmers or engineers being designers is that we believe we are normal users when we're not! I may have read Norman's design book and Spolsky's UI book, but I still suck at making user-friendly designs because as soon as I start hacking I my innocence is soiled by the technical knowledge I acquire. This is the greatest challenge of UI design and why most apps look like crap.

In this case we'd most likely have no concept of "fair use", each of the media giants would have people sign up to lifelong, incredibly restrictive contracts if they wished to see a movie, use a website or software. With no restrictions on the content of such contracts, forums like this would be sued out of existence for breach of contract if someone's avatar was an unauthorized copy, violated a contractual trademark and so on. I'd imagine it would be the end of free speech and the Internet as we know it.

I would certainly prefer our current state-sponsored monopolies over this sort of situation where legal might is right and the little guy has no protection other than isolating himself from the rest of society.

[citation needed]
Wikileaks just publish documents. When did they hack banks?!

Anonymous are just a group of trolls who mostly hang out on the imageboards and IRC. They're like a swarm of angry bees, you can't tell them what to do, and most don't actually do any hacking. A DDoS is not hacking.


Good idea... Why not make a service that identifies Bitcoin users by their public wallet addresses?