I don't know anything about crypto. Why can't he contact someone on the receiving end of the transaction and say "I really messed up, please transfer this money back to me?". I know crypto transactions can't be undone, but a new transaction of equal value in the reverse direction could be done, right? And if not, why the hell not?
This is true if the recipient is a person, but in this case it is a "Smart contract" which means it has particular programmed behavior and cannot just be asked to do something for ethical reasons. If it is not programmed to return money, it can't return money, and if it is not programmed to be reprogrammable, then it can't be reprogrammed to help this person.
how "smart" is a contract that will delivers good to non-existent entities. How "smart" is a contract that is actually a piece of code that's riddled with footguns? Calling these things "smart" contracts was the joke of the century.
Because he sent funds to a contract (a program) and not a person (a private key). The operation of the given contract (the actual program) cannot be altered, which is useful in the sense that you can inspect the contract code and make sure that it does what you want with the funds you send to it.
It is truly mind-boggling to me that funds can just effectively vanish in the system with no sense of recourse. And that no one thought this could go awry
If you own a Quest VR headset and have purchased games, a ban means you cannot play or download them. I would hope that would be reasonable grounds for a suit in small claims court. If they make membership in the social network a requirement of using a product you purchased, that comes with responsibilities on their end too.
It sounds like working there has become a distraction to working there, which means that working there has become fratcally stupid. Quitting sounds like a reasonable position to take.
I just finished a contract at a client that still has a live OpenVMS system running a mission critical application. It was interesting to compare my 25 year old fond memories of the OS with the practical experience of using it on a daily basis. No command line history, crazy long file paths, and case insensitive passwords were a shock. On the other hand, the built in DCL programming language was a saving grace. My wife, amazingly, found my decades-old copy of the "Writing Real Programs in DCL" book. Because of that, I looked like a VMS superhero.
I've got COBOL experience, but Everytime I check into these positions they aren't paying very well. I don't know about this particular case, but in general COBOL programmers aren't valued very much, despite the high demand within the narrow niches that still use COBOL.
No. Any signal that reach here from other star system will be too faint, and you need a huge antena to recollect enough power to detect the signal over the noise. The discovery is very overhyped in the press article (as usual).
Also, the detector is small, but it need to be cooled to very low temperatures, so the whole system will be not as small as the article describe.
