I agree with this very much. The WMDs are an example of intelligence errors as casus belli. It's important to keep in mind the political context as well, with Cold War II emerging from the last NATO summit http://www.salon.com/2016/07/12/the_west_escalates_with_russ...
I agree that folks are latching onto any "proof" they can find even when it's not true. I don't know what those devices were, but there are white noise devices that look like that. Also, it's not unheard of for these devices to be used by Clinton. Take a listen to these before/after videos. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-static-n...
I think you're right that people paying attention already knew. But there were denials from DWS that she was being unbiased. The same thing happened with the Snowden leaks. Most paying attention knew, but it was still upsetting when the proof came out.
I think it is always egregious, regardless of whether it happens all the time or not. For example, the USG is known to meddle with other countries elections. I don't think that's excusable. I assume the RNC played all kinds of tricks as well and that this is SOP for both parties. Wrong in every case.
You could theoretically get certified with only high school and work experience, although I don't think any employers would hire someone without a bachelor's. The degree can really be in anything though as long as you've passed an exam or two, as this shows an employer that you're serious and have learned at least something.
I believe the system works in our case because there is an ecosystem of employers, employees, recruiters, and government agencies that all buy into the exam process. It's sort of a throwback guild system that's not very similar to IT certifications such as CCNA.
I'm assuming you are ok with an association with cypherpunks / crypto-anarchy, because one certainly exists even if newcomers would rather relegate these roots to history. Hal Finney was a cypherpunk and bitcoin wouldn't be possible without his RPOW system. Wei Dai, who was cited in the original bitcoin whitepaper, was also a cypherpunk, and praised Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto. The list goes on...
There really was no "traditional approach" to creating a distributed digital currency at the time. The blockchain is a product of Satoshi's thought and is the central innovation in bitcoin. The principal issue was not anonymity but making a network that didn't require third parties to prevent double-spending. Genuine technical problems that a lot of smart people hadn't been able to solve were solved by bitcoin.
Bittorrent was way easier because it was about copying, whereas a currency has to in a sense make copying impossible via some sort of time-stamping to prevent double-spend.
This is not exactly correct. Nobody had proposed a system that was as distributed as bitcoin until bitcoin came on the scene. Szabo wanted to use lots of timestamp servers and Finney wanted to rely on "transparent servers" that borrowed ideas from Trusted Computing so they could be audited.
To have a currency backed by processing power is not really an old idea either. It was at most 10 years old and nobody really had a good idea how proof-of-work (POW) could make a currency at that time (around 1999). I'm referring to the "Bread Pudding" variant of MicroMint (http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf), not Cryptonomicon which doesn't really mention distributed computing or POW.
The blockchain is not just a hash tree. There's other features that mesh together in the blockchain. For example a proof-of-work system that allows bitcoin to be distributed and trust-less by preventing Sybil attacks. While using rewards for this work as the sole means of money creation was anticipated by others, the automatic means of adjusting the cost function is a Satoshi original and very important to the success of bitcoin.
I was a little surprised to see this getting traction on HN too. It would be like seeing a link to the Wayback Machine or Wolfram Alpha with no qualification.
