I have a problem with the word reusable. A reusable software should be a component in a larger solution. Not a complete solution itself.
If I accept that Stack Overflow or Discourse are reusable, because you can run them on different urls with different graphics, topic, moderators and users, then every application, for example Photoshop, is reusable in the same way, because multiple people use it to perform multiple tasks with images.
What you do with Discourse is good engineering, but there is nothing special about it. Every serious CMS, like WordPress or Drupal must inevitably be usable more than once.
Of course a piece of software that you intend to distribute to others must be reusable - that's the whole point. However, there are plenty of software systems that are one-offs. In the case of Stack Overflow, they wanted to see if the overall solution (which is much more than just the underlying code) would be good for different types of users or whether they had built a one-off.
With Discourse they are setting out from the beginning to make a reusable piece of software but that doesn't mean they are guaranteed to do so. Hence the extended development time before they offer it more widely.
I may not understand quantum computing properly, but would not this approach require N entangled qubits? If no, can someone explain how it would function on less than N qubits, for example 1? If it does require N qubits...I can imagine a classical solution with O(n) and slightly less ridiculous hardware requirements.
I have been making native Windows applications for years and I am still making them. Around year 2000, Microsoft was a reliable partner. They made the OS, provided the tools and others were free to make any applications they liked. There was little to complain about.
These days, being a Windows desktop software developer is pretty bad. Leaving out all the .net framework craze, Microsoft has made things much worse for many old software developers with their attempts to control everything. I am not OK with Microsoft being the one, who decides, whether users may run my software or not. I simply cannot develop for WinRT no matter how nice the native+HTML5 API may be. Even on desktop, Internet Explorer checks every download and hides the install button if the installer is "untrusted".
In short, Microsoft is not a reliable and respectful partner for independent software developers anymore.
Stopping a presidential plane because there may be someone as dangerous as Snowden onboard? That is completely ridiculous and out of proportion. Not only did no European country officially offer Snowden asylum, we have even made fools of ourselves by this action. I feel personally ashamed by what Europe did. Although my country has no direct involvement in this incident, it happened awfully close and it is depressing. Did Europe lost all sense and morals?
This was true 10 years ago. These days, every additional setting the application has is a liability. There is a growing group of people, who are scared to have conversation with their browser and make any informed decisions. They ignore such messages. Other people will change any setting they can find and then forget about it. Then they will be surprised and angry at the application that it is not working.
My experience shows that the more options an application has, the lazier the author was. What do you do as a software developer when there are two ways how to solve a problem? Ask the user which way to use? That is the wrong approach these days. The computer should not ask the user stupid questions. "Do you want to enable JavaScript?" is a stupid question for more than 98% of browser users. Instead of asking questions, software developers should invest the work to come with answers and "read the user's mind". Successful apps can do just that.
"Do you want to disable JavaScript?" is a stupid question, as you say. "Do you want your browser to tell Google, Facebook, Twitter, Omniture, DoubleClick, and six other companies you have never heard of, that you visited this site?" is not a dumb question. Given that option, 98% of users would say "hell no."
You are absolutely right that configurability is a sign of laziness, the opposite of hard work. But removing configurability is _not_ the sign of hard work. Hard work means addressing the interests of all parties, and Mozilla did not do that.
Why do those 2% of users disable JavaScript? It's in reaction to how JavaScript is used: it enables popups, enables distracting advertisements, lets all sorts of companies track me, makes sites load more slowly, etc. For this 2%, these uses are so odious as to outweigh the beneficial uses of JavaScript. So the hard work would be finding a way to distinguish between the user-friendly and user-hostile uses of JavaScript, and just disable the user-hostile ones, so that the interests of both classes of users would be satisfied.
This would not be new: Firefox's popup blocker is enabled by default, which demonstrates that JavaScript is already disabled for a particular use case, because it proved to be annoying to users. Why not take that a step further? If Mozilla wants to force JavaScript on, they should also address the reasons why that 2% of users go out of their way to disable it today. If those 2% say "I used to disable JavaScript, but now I don't have to" then Mozilla will have done their job.
"Do you want to disable JavaScript?" is a stupid question, as you say. "Do you want your browser to tell Google, Facebook, Twitter, Omniture, DoubleClick, and six other companies you have never heard of, that you visited this site?" is not a dumb question. Given that option, 98% of users would say "hell no."
Assuming you're correct (which I'm not convinced you are), when you then continue, "I have a checkbox that will make it so they don't track you, but it will also break those sites. Is that ok?" They will also respond "hello no".
Firefox's popup blocker is enabled by default, which demonstrates that JavaScript is already disabled for a particular use case, because it proved to be annoying to users. Why not take that a step further?
Right, because you can easily say that a non-user-triggered window.open() is almost always unwanted. I can't think of any other cases where it's so clear-cut and related to JS, or that disabling a particular facet of JS always would be a net win.
If you're going to claim that there's something like that, provide examples. How do you know people at Mozilla haven't already thought hard about this problem and decided there isn't much more they can do? I bet they have.
> "Do you want to disable JavaScript?" is a stupid question, as you say. "Do you want your browser to tell Google, Facebook, Twitter, Omniture, DoubleClick, and six other companies you have never heard of, that you visited this site?" is not a dumb question. Given that option, 98% of users would say "hell no."
-> This overstates the case, because you'd still presumably load the 1x1 tracking png with ?resid=<X>&uid=<Y>.
> "I have a checkbox that will make it so they don't track you, but it will also break those sites. Is that ok?" They will also respond "hello no".
This overstates the case most of the time because doing this generally breaks relatively little for those domains listed, and to the extent it doesn't, making that decision on a domain-by-domain basis seems to work pretty well (ask any Noscript user)
Sending browsing statistics to something like Google is already happening regardless of if you have Javascript enabled. When you are on Google search and you click on a link it's tracked that you went to that link.
But besides that and besides that your usage statistics are being logged on the server itself regardless of what you do. Expecting Mozilla or any company to figure out how to block a javascript put request sent to Facebook, but not other put requests which are there by design of the site will only result in Facebook finding a workaround.
It's unfortunate that some people use Javascript in ways that slow down their site. For example with horrendous 'sharing' widgets. You can use plugins to disable those items from loading but it wouldn't be Mozilla's place to decide that on everyone's behalf.
These days Javascript is as much a part of websites as the HTML itself.
> When you are on Google search and you click on a link it's tracked that you went to that link.
Google also tracks the links I click when I am on CNN, ABC News, Fox News, MSN, LinkedIn, and the majority of sites I visit (with the important exceptions of Wikipedia and BBC News - thanks guys!). Advertisers track me when I am not even on their properties! That is what is objectionable, and what is defeated by disabling JavaScript.
> Expecting Mozilla or any company to figure out how to block a javascript put request sent to Facebook, but not other put requests which are there by design of the site will only result in Facebook finding a workaround.
Perhaps, but Mozilla should do it anyways.
Remember the ruckus over IE 10 enabling Do Not Track by default? Advertisers and ad brokers were “very concerned”[1] by even the whiff of a browser maker acting in the interest of users over advertisers. Do Not Track is only tolerable if it is off by default, wholly unenforceable, and just as buried as the “Enable JavaScript” option.
Make no mistake: advertisers believe that they have a right to know what links you click and sites you visit across the whole web, and even a right to enlist your browser to aid in informing them. And Mozilla is complicit!
(And why not? Recall who pays Mozilla’s bills.)
> These days Javascript is as much a part of websites as the HTML itself.
Yes, which means that those few who disable JavaScript pay a significant price for that decision. Nobody disables JavaScript because they hate the language. They do it to escape user-hostile JavaScript programs.
It's ineffective in the sense that it doesn't stop all of the evil. It IS effective in the sense that running no javascript really limits the amount of information people can learn about your system. Like, why should a website be able to learn about the size of my screen, the complete enumeration of all of my plugins and fonts, etc?
As far as blowing off your leg, sometimes you just really hate tennis elbow, you know?
I did read them, and I did consider them. After thinking up a reply as why you think basic client display capability querying mechanisms are inappropriate, I decided you were most likely being sarcastic.
On (multiple) repeated readings, I'm not really sure you were intending to make a point one way or the other. If I attribute the second sentence of It IS effective in the sense that running no javascript really limits the amount of information people can learn about your system. Like, why should a website be able to learn about the size of my screen, the complete enumeration of all of my plugins and fonts, etc? to your voice, then it seems you are. If that's to be taken as the user's voice as rationale as to why JS doesn't need to be enabled, then it's fairly neutral.
At this point, with your reply taken into consideration, I'm confused. Feel free to elaborate.
> If ... you are doing Internet wrong
Well, my first sentence was actually asking you, since I wasn't sure.
Correct. I'm being completely serious, with the exception of the remark about exploding limbs (obviously).
Broad enumeration capabilities of this sort don't make sense. You don't need me to tell you why, because the moment you considered these features not existing, you immediately thought up alternatives that didn't involve running javascript, some of which require changes in the way people think about building web-pages, some of which may require changes in various specifications.
JS has more features than it deserves for learning about and (critically) sharing information about the host platform. Yes, you can still learn some things as a website operator by watching what browsers load/don't load, and what they put in their requests.
That does not mean that disabling javascript doesn't have value w/r to privacy concerns. Compare panopticlick.eff.org w/, w/o javascript enabled.
Edit: I should hasten to add that there are other concerns beyond privacy, like accessibility and the fact that a web page has no bloody business deciding that I'm likely running an iPad and therefor I shouldn't have access to X or Y. This is dumb, and contrary to the idea of the open internet. It's the same thing that's wrong with this EME nonsense.
Ah, I took your position as being able to determine screen size (or have it determined automatically through CSS or some other hands-off mechanism) itself was also unneeded, not just that JS should not have this capability.
I can get behind most of what you say - as long as we are talking about simple, presentation based websites.
Where I think there's a breakdown in this view is when you consider complex web applications, including games. At that point, I believe some level of inspection capabilities are required, if we desire to have complex web apps delivered through the internet. I'm by no means sold that on-demand web delivered code is necessarily a good thing though. There's far too large a surface area to adequately secure while still making it useful, IMHO.
Ghostery is a much better option for blocking trackers without breaking websites. If you're really paranoid, RequestPolicy lets you specify a whitelist of OK domains, and disable everything else. Both of those still allow javascript and do a 8better* job protecting your privacy, from tracking pixels etc.
"These days, every additional setting the application has is a liability."
If we follow this thinking too far, we end up with a closed console like device, or Gnome 4 as parodied last April [1].
Surely there is a case for progressive revealing/enabling of advanced functions?
In the UK, the Blackberry phones are very popular with teenagers because of BBM. This desire to access BBM even extends to students carrying two phones, one an old blackberry handset on wifi and the other an iPhone or whatever. You will find small groups in corners at lunchtime exploring the features of the handsets. Experts will coach those who know less. If I could get that level of peer tutoring going in Maths, I'd have my OBE in the bag quite soon! Users can increase their knowledge provided the unfolding of extra features is managed.
I don't think Gnome is a relevant example. They don't support adding functionality back that they've taken out, whereas Firefox users are encouraged to add all the functions they want via extensions.
The downside of progressive functions in the base install is that the core Firefox team would have to support all the functions.
Removing options is NOT the way to go. If anything, there should be more options, until computers understand natural language.
To be most intuitive to use, computers should converse like a human. Humans have LOTS of options, and everyone understands that. E.g. if I ask a human to make a sandwich, I can specify all the ingredients I want, how and when I want it, and so on.
The ideal computer, too, would adjust its software to my preference. E.g. if I can, using natural language, explain the computer that I want JavaScript disabled, it can figure out what that means and what in the source code or flags of Firefox it has to change for me to have that disabled. Or if I tell it I want a big refresh button in the center of the screen, it can improvise and render one for me.
Far future of course, but that is the most intuitive end goal of computers: you ask them what you want in natural language, they understand and provide it.
For now, because the above does not yet work, please provide options. Fortunately Firefox provides many options for those who need them: about:config. I find it really awesome if you can adjust an application to your needs at such fine grained level.
I think your sandwich analogy is spot on in the sense that I can also just ask a human "please make me a sandwich" without specifying anything, and (most) humans could proceed to do so without more details. There should be more options, and a good "default" mode for people who don't want to fiddle with them. To my knowledge this is why most wizards have basic configuration options and a "advanced" button to click for the detailed configuration, and I don't see why Firefox can't just have the same thing.
<i> can also just ask a human "please make me a sandwich" without specifying anything, and (most) humans could proceed to do so without more details</i>
Depends who you ask. My mate and a few close friends would know to make me a sandwich without bread, but hardly anyone else would get that right.
Because some help desk told them to. The other day chase manhattan was down with a full on 500 server fucked up. Their twitter account responded to me telling me to clear my cache and delete my cookies. Classic.
A naive user would then open settings in an emotional and annoyed state and would turn off anything that caused an emotional response of fear. JavaScript, Ive heard of that and I don't like it so kill it stupid thing computers are so frustrating they never work. Click
If Google really wants to "not do evil", they should actively work on removing themselves from this position of power they have. They should also work on making it impossible for any entity to obtain this kind of power. That is certainly a very difficult task, but there are little things that can be done and would make a difference (real support for freenet, bitcoins, or wikileaks).
Just gathering power is evil, because in a few years the temptation to use the power will be too strong.
Also being a public company complicates the strict "Don't be evil" logic. Shareholders, in general, doesn't care about being too ethical in a metaphysics sense.
It's time to think that private companies has a most promising ethical future than public ones.
I think you can only say that, if you measure this on a spectrum, they only have a wider potential range of evil:good. Any conclusion about clustering would be founded on an utter lack of data.
I agree that someone should fork bitcoin and fix the mining problem. But screw transaction rates, the mining difficulty shall be determined by the nodes (people) participating in the network. Periodically, every node votes and a (weighted) average determines future mining difficulty. It may be a technical problem, but it may also be the right solution. And it will make the bitcoin more democratic.
Oh, dear. If I were the president of PayPal and wanted to make quick buck, I would buy some bitcoins, released news like this, and sold my bitcoins the next day with a nice profit. And then, I could just deny the news, sending bitcoin value back where it was so that it is ready for the next exploiter... Heh.
But seriously, PayPal and Bitcoin are by nature rivals. If PayPal wanted to have a crypto-currency, it would develop its own, not validate and boost value of another one gaining nothing in the process.
A lot of what keeps regular Joes away from bitcoin is its complexity and the difficulty of keeping your funds secure. If PayPal were to make the most secure, easiest-to-use bitcoin wallet, they could profit greatly from it and also provide something that doesn't really exist anywhere yet.
All PayPal does right now is help you get dollars from point A to point B, and in the process they take a cut. They could do the same thing with bitcoin. I don't think it would be competition with bitcoin, it would be promoting it to mutual benefit.
I would be afraid of them providing this service without allowing you to export your data, however, which seems like the kind of thing PayPal might like to do. If your bitcoins were trapped in their system you're always in danger of having your account frozen as has been a problem up to now. Part of the purpose of bitcoin is to be able to avoid that, so I'd hate for PayPal to bring that whole problem to the bitcoin world.
But if they approach it properly, bitcoin could be a great opportunity for PayPal, instead of a threat.
You cannot collect profits from a transaction between 2 Bitcoin users like PayPal does right now with "real" money. If the world adopted Bitcoin, it would be the end of PayPal's business model. If PayPal were ready to replace their business model with something way less profitable, but more future-proof, it would still make no sense for them to adopt bitcoin. It would only make sense if they owned significant amount (50%) of the existing bitcoins and had the code base under at least indirect control. What would happen if this were true and the bitcoiners found out? ...too many ifs.
That said, Bitcoin will never become a commonly used currency in its current form. The built-in deflation is a fatal flaw, which makes it unusable for normal buyers or sellers. It is only appealing for "get-rich-quick" investors, which is a shame, 'cause we really need a good solution (0% fee & safe) for online payments.
There's no reason PayPal has to build a vanilla bitcoin wallet interface. It's true that you cannot simply deduct a certain percentage from a direct bitcoin transaction. However, they could pool your coins in their own controlled address, and when you choose to send a payment through them, it makes one transaction on your behalf for that amount, and also a second transaction for 1% to their revenue address.
Average Joes who don't want to bother having to understand bitcoin may find this tradeoff acceptable if PayPal makes it worth it by providing a very simple and secure bitcoin interface that is better than everything else out there.
Whether you think bitcoin itself is doomed to failure due to deflation and all that is a different topic entirely.
One of the advantages of bitcoin is that you do not need a middle man to do a transaction. Some people may choose one for whatever reason, but would they be OK with paying the transaction fees? Would you use a credit card if you had to pay 4% more than if you paid in cash? I do not think many people would be OK with that.
It may sound as if I am a PayPal lover and bitcoin hater, which is NOT the case. I just do not see them cooperating sensible.
Interestingly, Bitcoin does support transactions which have a third party acting as an arbitrator; these transaction require the consent of two out of three participants in order for the money to be transferred. PayPal is essentially a fraud detection business disguised as a money-transfer business, so this seems like a natural niche for them.
(Technically, every Bitcoin transaction has a script in a Forth-like, non-Turing-complete bytecode which specifies the conditions needed for the transaction to be valid. It supports m-out-of-n signature requirements, among many other fun things.)
As I take it, it's not really possible yet. In any case, we're talking about 'multi-signature transactions' [0]:
A multi-signature transaction is one where a certain number of Bitcoins are "encumbered" with more than one recipient address. The subsequent transaction that spends these coins will require each party involved (or some subset, depending on the script), to see the proposed transaction and sign it with their private key. This necessarily requires collaboration between all parties -- to propose a distribution of encumbered funds, collect signatures from all necessary participants, and then broadcast the completed transaction. [0]
If you are using Blockchain's Mywallet, you might already be able to use them, as an end-user. [1]
One way to implement them is by allowing a more generic 'script execution per transaction' (not sure of wording) mechanism, proposed in BIPs 16 and 17. [2] [3]
Also see bitcoin.stackexchange question about multisig TXes. [4]
As I understand it, if you're a developer wanting to implement arbitrated bitcoin transactions, you'll have to wait. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
You write:
"Would you use a credit card if you had to pay 4% more than if you paid in cash? "
That is exactly what happens today on the real world. If you make it convinient for me to use your "credit card", I will use it, and because of that, vendors pay the 4% fee. All paypal needs to do is to make it easy (at non bitcoin vendors for example) for me to spend my bitcoins and I will use it. Vendors will fall in line because they want my business.
The above said.. IMHO, there is no way in hell that "the man" will allow bitcoin in its current form to prosper (at least not without a heck of a fight), as to much visibility & control would be lost.
Today, the buyer does not experience the fee. Sellers accept it, because the middle man gives them no other choice. With bitcoins, the middle man has no leverage anymore as the buyer and the seller can interact directly. That was my point.
The buyer does experience the fee in the form of increased price. They just don't notice it because it's baked in. Anyone who buys stuff at the grocery store in cash is financing other people's rewards points.
In some cases you can end up paying a charge for using a credit card. Low cost airlines are an example. EasyJet adds a 2.5% surcharge for credit cards. People still use them.
You don't need a middle man for physical cash (let's use USD as the example), but services like credit cards and debit cards are extremely convenient. Middle men can certainly be of great value to the bitcoin economy, by providing similar services to the ones that already exist on top of government currencies.
It's like oil companies investing in green tech. If that's where you think the world is headed, it's better to get on the train and be a player than to get left behind.
For PayPal and BTC - even in the best scenario for BitCion, there's going to be a very long transition period, and PayPal has a very good position to profit from being an intermediate in that period. And once all centralised currencies are gone, true, PayPal's current business model is irrelevant, but by then, they'll have world-class expertise on BitCoin and can probably keep in the game as wallet operators or makers of hardware for casual transactions or whatever.
> Yeah, I mean, gold didn't work as a currency all those hundreds of years.
Actually, it didn't. Gold was almost never the exclusive currency, usually wasn't the most common currency, was rarely a significant direct currency (rather than backing for currency) when people actually used currency for most transactions, and when it became the exclusive backing for currency, only "worked" because the actual circulating currency supply became increasingly disconnect from the gold notionally backing it.
Gold, as a currency, works tolerably well much of the time (though still can break an economy with unexpected surpluses or shortages) in the way it was actually used -- the high-value-density one of several commodities used in currencies in systems where most transactions using currency don't use gold, and most transactions don't use currency at all, but not even tolerably well outside of that domain.
Many economists believe that the gold standard contributed to several depressions during those centuries. Gold "worked" because nothing better was known, but modern fiat money works better.
If the bitcoin protocols changed to allow divisions to 9 decimal places instead of 8, would that be viewed as an increase in the money supply, or no change, in traditional economics?
Would re-introducing a half-penny coin increase the money supply? No. Basically, as long as you maintain proportionality, you can re-denominate currency (or shares for that matter) at will.
More relevantly, nothing stops you from creating a tradeable note that says "redeemable for 1 bitcoin from <trusted authority>" and then using those as currency.
This happened with gold, and also would happen if we saw a true bitcoin bank rather than bitcoin wallet -- they'd pay a bit of interest, and in return would pool their deposits and use some fraction of them to generate revenue through other channels.
The amount of effort required to find gold has more or less increased over time, and barring an unpredictable discovery of a huge amount of gold somewhere, the mechanics of increasing the gold supply aren't all that different than bitcoin. Or, to put it another way, I don't think the steady but slow increase in the gold supply is a substantial contributor to the current gold market.
No. Gold production has definitely become more energy intensive, and in this regard it is somewhat similar to bitcoin. HOWEVER, with bitcoin, marginal mining cost is a function of cumulative supply. As supply reaches 21M, marginal cost goes to infinity, and it doesn't matter what technology you bring to bear. Whereas with gold, technological advances have moved the equivalent of bitcoin's 21M to 42M, 84M, etc. The maximum possible supply increases. Yes, of course at some point the technological maximum will reach the physical maximum, but we aren't there yet.
The result of all this is that gold supply has grown with the economy over the past 500 years. It may be deflationary relative to fiat currency, but it is nothing like the deflationary profile of bitcoin, not at all.
David Marcus makes ~$1.5-2M / year, and has $11M+ in stock options, plus whatever he made from selling his last startup (Zong). I really don't think he needs to worry about gaming the bitcoin ecosystem.
Also: Developing a new currency is hard, and inherently antagonistic with other governments. BTC, on the other hand, is basically tolerated for the time being.
Bitcoin is more than a currency, it's also a massive, international, and reliable transaction network. Furthermore it isn't tied to any individual entity (government or corporation) so there is value in its impartiality and lack of restrictions on senders or recipients.
