There are many hard startup problems (autonomous robotics, craigslist competitors) which have had people crash upon the rocks in pursuit them. Does that automatically make them stupid to try? Bitcoin's failures don't mean all non-state issued digital currencies will fail.

Yes but he's actually using bitcoin, not trying to come up with another digital currency.

Source on this? Sorry, but recent events have encouraged me to be more stringent about fact-checking.

What a load of horseshit. Unless he prefaced every performance with a disclaimer that the piece was a work of fiction, his theatrical performances were no more legitimate than the TAL appearance.

It also undermines his point. If getting people to believe what you want them to believe and do what you want them to do requires you to pump up the truth, maybe people were justified in their original opinions and actions after all if the mere truth wouldn't change their minds.

There is no sane interpretation in which he did not knowingly and with gusto embrace the misunderstandings his shading of the truth created. I can't respect that.

I'm sorry, you seem to have this site confused with Script Kiddy News.

And failing!

You use the phrase "muck raking" like it's a bad thing.

Seen any of the coverage of the leveson inquiry have we

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/leveson-inquiry

It depends on whether the muckraking is exposing or reframing. Most of the supermarket tabloids do more of the latter kind of muckraking.

Not really related to the content of the article, but my pointer wandered over some dot on the page. Suddenly it started animating, with the caption "DON'T MOVE." So I didn't. Then it changed to a checkmark, with the caption "SENT." What the hell did I just do?

You just sent your entire email list to his servers.

You sent an HTTP POST to http://dcurt.is/stealing-your-address-book/add_kudos. This results in incrementing the "# KUDOS" number under the dot. He seems to have built his own "like this" button, essentially, with a like counter.

I did this as well, it seems very obvious but it's a great insight in human behaviour.

Gave "Kudos" it seems. Kinda like a +1 or thumbs up.

Ubuntu's target market has a very different interpretation of "a bunch of footwork" than yours.

sudo aptitude install kde-full shouldn't be "a bunch of footwork" by any standard by someone who passed high school.

I'd hazard a guess that there's a not-insignificant number of Ubuntu users for whom opening the terminal is "a bunch of footwork".

I used to live with a 40-something woman who was fairly technologically impaired, the kind of person you would expect to get a MacBook Air and call it a day. She ran Mint. Now, granted, it was installed by our room mate who was (still is, I suppose) a CS grad student, but she got by just fine with Mint, LibreOffice, and Chrome. Never used anything else, and never had a need to go plunking around on the command line.

I suspect Susan is not alone among Linux users who just wanted a cheap computer that worked and had some nerd install a user-friendly distro for them.

"The primary goal of eclim is to bring Eclipse functionality to the Vim editor." Maybe you're talking about vimplugin, which eclim uses a fork of to embed gvim in eclipse?

Thirded.