This happened even here in HN, I think these guys are the equivalent of the MS fans back at the time of the dot-com bubble telling how MS would rule the world.

EDIT: a "this" became "these"

Apple already realized that as their recent announcement demonstrated.

I don't really know how this is different, I just since left reading HN on a regular basis.

EDIT: I thought you were talking about guylhem... my mistake.

For me it was odd, bitcoin appears a good way to move money from there to the other side of the River Plate.

Depends on the device no? Suppose you have a chip with a backdoor, if said chip depends on a OS to operate and you can for example block connections (using a packet filter, either blacklisting the undesirable ones or drop all except the whitelisted ones), then whatever backdoor is there will need an unblocked connection to be activated.

As I see it the majority of hardware backdoors would only be useful if you can have some sort of access to the device, either remotely in a network the device is connected, physically (as far as I understand that's how Stuxnet spread in Iran) or if the user willingly executes some code that exposes the backdoor to you over some routing.

Good to know you're not in that second group.

I not a fan of Satriani but keep rocking.

You're right about one thing though, my American (and British, Australians, Anglo Canadians among others from the same language group) friends are lazy as hell to read subtitles generally, the majority never ever getting interest of learning another language since almost anyone learns some English, which really puzzles me.

I love Erva Mate (I'm Brazilian, it's how we say "Yerba Mate" in Portuguese) and try to drink some every morning. I love a beer as well.

Out of curiosity, are you from South America?

Anyway there'll probably always be people behind the algorithms doing the modeling or programming at least.

I'm just trying to learn some emacs and although I see its value, the emacs experience is not for me, my vimrc is like every other config file that I have, a bare minimum. People who use emacs generally tweak the editor with thousand of lines of elisp.

EDIT: For those who do not remember the 2.x stuff when x was a odd number the version was unstable, when it was an even number the version was stable and basically was what distributions used.

It's my experience the majority of people just don't really care about political philosophy, they just live and that's all, they are really more interested on who are romantically attracted to them than to think about all the stuff Rand wrote.

I really don't know what you were taught, I studied in a Jewish religious school (a Yeshiva) and for the matter my experience was very different than that of my peers when I reached university, in university I was taught mathematics only and professors had a myriad of political views, including the one who introduced me to Rand's work. But yes, the traditional Jewish thought is very different than whatever Rand ever wrote.

So what's your proposal here? I would love that each generation we had the wealth allocated on a purely merit basis but the world does not work like that, I know a fair share of mediocre people with fortunes who can send their children to better schools and some smarter poor fellas that can't, and besides I live in Brazil and ignoring the past did not produced a really better alternative.

EDIT: Text was bad