revdinosaur

Interesting, is this true for males of all species or is it limited to human males?

I would argue that his ideas, outside his domain, are not communicated well because they are not well-formed. Criticizing him for being boorish and ill-informed about social issues does not take away from him being an accomplished biologist. Assuming that he's just botching the expression of an otherwise worthwhile thought is furthering that appeal to his inappropriate authority.

It's dehumanizing to the victims to dismiss allegations of sexual assault because of a convenient theory that aligns with your politics. While it may be your version of Occam's Razor to assume that this is an internationally-coordinated plot against him, I find it much easier to believe that a person with a lot of public self-regard could be guilty of one of the most common crimes committed by humans: acquaintance rape.

What's really frustrating is watching people conflate Assange with Wikileaks and defend the individual as if he's the organization. It causes people who are skeptical of rapists and cult-of-personality individuals to be made out to be anti-whistleblowers and that's not fair. I think Wikileaks operates best as an anonymous organization and not under the control of a figurehead.

Do you include in your estimate those who may currently be JS developers not by choice but due to the vogue of web apps?

I'm not in disagreement at all. This is a valuable purpose of the press.

I find your frequent use of "tumblr-isation" as a negative to be alarmingly anti-intellectual for this site. Do you realize that the terms you pick out, "privilege" and "patriarchy" are of academic origin from Gender Studies and that they have been co-opted by Tumblr? It seems that your entire case against Shanley is that they write in the convention of their academic peers.

Well that line of reasoning is exactly what I was referring to. The reporter doing due diligence and fact gathering is in ill taste, but responding in kind and releasing personal information about her is justified? That doesn't hold water, logically. I don't think anyone is that naive. It's alright if you're upset about divulging Nakamoto's personal details, it's the tit-for-tat mentality that comes across as childish.

This has a tinge of pettiness to it, don't you think?

I worry about any economic system that is defended almost entirely with a verse that, at best, belongs on a coffee cup.

I think that it does, to some degree, in order to fulfill some of the promises that proponents claim will be delivered in the near future. There are ceaseless calls by BTC advocates for retailers of all kinds to accept bitcoin payments. For this to happen on a large enough scale there needs to be distributed demand by a great number of consumers, not frequent demands by a few edge cases.

I don't entirely disagree, but even still people understood both of those things conceptually before they existed. Credit, arguably, predates state-backed currencies and PayPal provides the same functionality as a bank for online transactions. Bitcoin is a traded commodity represented by long hashes stored on disk. It's very abstract and coupled with its current volatility it makes it hard to pull people in if they aren't already convinced that its massive deflation will make them rich.

That said I have mined and sold bitcoin (luckily a few weeks ago) I just remain skeptical about its viability to go mainstream considering these and many other barriers. I was personally frustrated by it when making a recent purchase due to the fact that my buying power fluctuated by 10% while proceeding from shopping cart to checkout.

I think the argument against your anecdote is that it was the best solution for you--no doubt a technologically literate person who has confidence in their mental model of what bitcoin is. For the general populace, it's a distant novelty still which reduces its general practicality greatly.