I've seen a few posts by people saying that the name and language on your page remind them too much of some of the current flame wars. I personally don't care, but were you all aware? Why the name shill?
There are also a lot of other non-HEMA historical european martial arts groups and less historical EuroMA. For instance you can find stick fighting most palces, Jogo Do Pau is Portuguese stick/staff fighting, Savate is French kickboxing usually with cane and maybe some sailor stuff, Zipota is similar, but from Basque Spain. Lots of herding cultures kept this stuff alive and whether it is MMA or something else they seem to be getting more attention.
That's just being difficult. The real world does work that way. Take poltical labels for example, liberal, conservative, et al have totally different meanings for different people. Contradictions do exist, just externalizing them in a formal system is lazy.
The question you should ask yourself is; "Is it right for you and your project?" It doesn't matter as far as your project if the community should be moving on as a whole or not. What matter's is if you, and/or your team, can effectively use the technology to reach your goals.
I thought a lot of that money was accounted for coming out of branches of Cypriot banks that remained open in the UK and Russia.
Not saying that bitcoin isn't where some or a lot of it ended up, but the black market was basically the first adopter of bitcoin, and black markets (and pornographers) are traditionally early adopters of any new technology.
Sort of the price we pay.
Doesn't mean it's a pump and dump. If it is where international criminal syndicates (who probably have more economic power than some nations) decide to bank long term in bitcoins it might actually be a stabilizing force.
That's assumes you are starting from no one having any to one person having them all. If someone had 1 billion in demand for bitcoins it would drive the price up, some would sell hoping to cash out, but others probably more would save seeing this big new interest as a sign of increasing value. You can't count out the sociology and the theater of it. Or other external forces like unstable/untrustworthy national currencies, or the value of relative anonymity.
Same things are true for any currency, this is partly why they work. We can trust because we have common interest in the solvency of any commonly used currency. A dollar is only worth what someone will give you for it.
There eventually wont be much point to mining when the cap is reached, then there will be a point to process blocks for their transaction fees. You are also right about the hardware issue, plus there are other more profitable ways to use a botnet. There is also just a general problem with the argument that it incentivises botnets, they are their own incentive, anything that needs bandwidth, cpu power, and stolen information will be much easier with a botnet.
Don't forget that bitcoin can be broken down into arbitrarily small fractions. It caps, but it can still grow by being traded in increasingly smaller values. Which I don't think we really have an economic model for.
And yeah, the author seems to miss a lot of the things in the bitcoin website. The whole thing presumes there are unforeseen consequences, that something will replace or complement it, and that it will be remarkably volatile for some time. It is first in breed and very well aware of that.
> I wouldn't want the web as a platform to be that good
What? Are you so ideologically caught up that you actually wish something wont get good? It is totally reasonable to to think something isn't the right approach or a waste of time, or to not like the workflow, etc. But to actually wish that something wont get good enough to be a general solution even if it can? How does that make any sense?
Even as someone relatively new to development and a native of the web this seems so clear to me. The web was originally just a way of sharing documents. It is both a miracle and heresy that we have managed to do so much with it. We could very well do with some foundational rethinking of what the web is beyond all the web 2.0 buzzwords.
That said, I have never understood the driving need for desktop like frameworks. The problems that ubiquitusly networked applications and communications technology face are nothing like those of kernel code, commandline applications, or modern applications like CAD Photoshop. All the things you mention that need fixing desperately need it, but I don't think a desktop like framework/library/standard for the web will ever 'win' because the web is not trying to solve the problem of a virtual desktop, it is trying to solve the problem of a non-homogeneous ubiquitously networked data exchange layer.
"comparing apples to oranges" that is kind of the whole point here.
Most of the arguments in this thread are coming from two totally different perspectives. Some holding doggedly to various ideals and dogmas and instead of trying to learn the new domain, they try and make the apples look like oranges. This never works. Most are right about this or that when it comes to the domain that they are experienced in, but when economics forces people into a new problem space some don't try and learn the new space as a thing in and of itself, instead they try and adapt their methodologies and abstract to a different problem space they are more familiar with. That is where these conflicts come from.
All of this is just such antagonistic linkbate if you ask me. No offense to OP, but it really just seems like oh I had a controversial thought so I'll play up two sides.
Maybe one isn't better than the other? Maybe they are just different kinds of things and some people work better in one or the other. Maybe some projects do to. We live and work in dynamic environments and there is no big T Truth in design. People change, the requirements change, the market changes.
Indulging in this kind of petty software holier-than-thou while highlighting only flaws and failures as defining characteristics of another generation is only destructive for the entire community.
If OP was serious this would have actually been about showing a new generation of coders good cathedrals, and not just banal whining.
I agree that multi-directional voting is worth exploring and that promoting karma points leads to more sensationalism. Possibly even some form of democratic tagging?
I think that is a point missed by this article and many others. People are going after what they think they can get funded in large part. In the comments on the post there is a nice Peter Thiel quote about innovation in the physical world basically getting outlawed (his libertarian bent shows strongly here) driving innovation to software. And while I don't really agree with all of it, I really think that to a certain extent, be it through patents, super dominant companies, government prohibition, or even just cultural forces, it is really hard to go big.