After all the bitcoins are mined, you can't mine them, right? Because they're all mined.

There aren't any left to mine.

So you can't mine them.

I don't see how this is a problem that incentives can solve, and I don't see how it is a problem period.

It would be no great surprise if voting on this bill went along the same lines as the congressional vote on reining in "the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 'no' voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 'yes' voters."

In particular,

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is married to Richard C. Blum, who was substantially invested in URS Corp, which owns EG&G, a leading government technical provider that has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in security-related contracts. Feinstein never abstained from voting when it affected her husband’s wallet and Blum made $100 million when he sold his shares, as investigative reporter Peter Byrne exposed in his 2007 series the “Feinstein Files.”

( http://www.indypendent.org/2013/07/16/nsa-follows-you-we-follow-money )

See also:

• NSA Defenders Protecting Their Own Wallets,
• Feinstein: 700k From NSA Affiliates Since 2007 PRISM Launch
• Big campaign donations from contractors doing secret work for NSA,
• .. etc.

Good luck firing them, though.

In any case, 1.5 million out of 30 million is 5 percent (isn't it?) So the summary implies 1.5 percent (5 - 3.5) have internet access but don't use it. Maybe they use it but just won't own up!

Actually, you could make a case that the technology in 1984 is linguistic in nature and that the "sci" in its sci-fi is linguistics and social psychology.

I appreciate you're taking the view that it's a purely technical question, but moral questions are rarely far away from security concerns (why do you need the security?) and TFA acknowledges this by raising the moral issue directly:

Sometimes, the malicious insider isn’t so malicious. This is the argument many are making in Snowden’s situation these days

TFA doesn't resolve it directly, though. It goes on to liken Snowden to Terry Childs and then Childs to Jason Cornish.

This comes off as a weak attempt to tar Snowden with the moral dubiety surrounding Cornish's spiteful data deletion spree. (More charitably, perhaps it's just a clumsy effort to indicate a subjective factor in such moral arguments, or perhaps the author is just rambling.)

At any rate, having mentioned the argument it doesn't answer it, apart from to say this point of view (the view that there are cases where people have pretty good moral reasons for breaching security) "isn't new."

The Slashdot story itself can be read as to imputing malice to Snowden (right at the end: "malicious insider") and indicating that the consequences of his leaks are "catastrophic" for the NSA. "Massively disruptive" would be a value-neutral way of putting it; whether or not it's catastrophic is going to depend on what views you have about the activities and goals of the NSA.

The technical question is an interesting one, sure, but don't expect people to ignore the moral dimension, especially when it's presented in such sloppy fashion.

"with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code" - so why don't you test their code, then? (If you can't do this yourself, hire QA.) Regard the contract as complete when all your tests pass (note: *your* tests!).

If bugs are found after the project is complete, it is because the test coverage was incomplete, or QA failed, and you should be happy to take responsibility for having them resolved (including payment if necessary.)

According to what I read, "innuendo" is an Italian suppository.

Are you kidding?