They don't need to be IT, but a modicum of competence in their everyday tools of the trade is assumed and expected. And yes, computers ARE their tools of the trade as well. Not just ours. Sadly they don't have that competence in so many cases. I have had to support so many users in various places that didn't even KNOW they had a username that came along with their password to log into their PCs. You see, they didn't have to type it every morning so they forgot it existed!
When someone is supposedly capable to drive a car for example, they cannot say they only know how to go up to third gear, can't change lanes and don't know how to park it because they only need to "drive" and make right turns to go wherever they need. Oh, and they only understand the stop sign. No other sign is needed. Would it ever be OK because they are not a professional driver or a mechanic? It seems this sort of excuse is supposed to pass in an analogous IT scenario.
That is correct. But blockchain-based voting can still be useful and reduce voting costs.
Ideally, you would keep the requirement of showing up at the polls. You would verify your identity manually and be issued a private key on the spot with your smartphone, with a token to vote. You would use that immediately in a terminal where you would cast that vote much like you scan a qr code and pay with a bitcoin address. Later in the day, or the next day, you would verify your vote is included, in a similar way that you check bitcoin address activity on a block explorer.
This does not solve all problems but massively reduces the risks mentioned in the original post. Of course you can still have spouse coercion and stuff, like "show me who you voted" etc.
Crypto veterans and true enthusiasts have seen this happen before. The 2014 bear market lasted over 2 years. They are not worried.
It is disappointing however to see posts like this and the usual replies.
Those people mentioned taking loans or thinking about sticking it to the man are just pathetic and they deserve what they got. If it wasn't bitcoin, it would have been the dotcom bubble or something else. Particularly the Korean woman who lost 90%. That could only have happened if she invested in shitcoins, probably expecting higher gains than typical. When something goes parabolic, a heavy correction is inevitable and that is irrespective of the value of the asset, whatever you may think it is. Anyone who fails to understand basic concepts has no business investing in anything.
And again, nobody focuses on actually learning what the tech is about, how it can be useful and why. All they care about is making money fast and easy. I'm sorry it doesn't work that way and it's not bitcoin's fault. There is only one way this could go for people like them.
The others, who know why they put their money (not more than they can afford) into bitcoin and actually bothered reading up before doing so are not worried.
In the end, if you believe that bitcoin has a future and adoption will increase, today's marketcap is far too small, and (longterm) increase is inevitable. If you believe it's just the latest craze and will die out, you should never invest a penny in it.
Given the whole mining frenzy that is still driving GPU prices to the moon (unlike the coins they are used to mine), if there ever was a time for a third contestant in this market, now should be it
What you really want is reactOS. Unfortunately, despite being in development for almost 20 years, it's practically unusable. Desktop OSes will probably become obsolete before it even comes out of alpha
You can't draw any conclusions about ownership distribution from addresses. They don't map to persons 1:1 First, many experienced users hold bitcoin in dozens of addresses each. They have different addresses in different wallets for different uses (storage, spending etc)
Second and most important, many of the huge amount addresses you see are actually exchange addresses. Exchange hold bitcoin for millions of people (if not millions by now, they are in the hundreds of thousands) but they consolidate them in just a handful of addresses.
That is assuming equality was ever the issue. Bitcoin and cryptos are disruptive, they take power from banks and give it to individuals (at least those that spend the time to learn how to actually use it effectively). While this may level the playfield in some ways, I doubt anyone explicitly said it leads to equality.
Bitcoin supporters are into it for the censorship resistance, the fact that it trancends nations, pseudonimity (NOT anonymity, though you can get that too if you try hard enough and involve other cryptos), trasparency in transactions (which is not incompatible with pseudonymity or even anonymity).
The media chooses to focus on criminals, energy waste and ponzi schemes, but I would not expect otherwise.
At the very least you should have been able to download the latest version 1703, burn the iso or make a bootable stick and reinstall, while keeping all apps and settings. It generally works, I've been updating this way for years
It still doesn't explain you you even got to this weird position where nothing works update-wise and it is the first time I hear of such a serious disability.
Is it a brand name laptop like dell or HP perhaps, where OS updating only works through their own specialized application?
What got us there was the cold war. Both from a symbolic perspective (can't let the commies beat us) and an actual fear perhaps. Like whoever conquers space first has an advantage and can build orbital weapons and blast us to hell kind of thing. However silly it may sound today.
We are long past those notions. Presidents can no longer justify the significant costs when other more mundane matters are pressing and can win them votes.
Maybe this will change again in the future, with China, or maybe the private sector will have a real incentive big enough to drive investment towards that area.
How come there is no movie adaptation of neuromancer? That's where the matrix name comes from.
It's probably no easy task to adapt it in a way that is both entertaining to a large audience and not disappointing to fans of the book at the same time, but I believe it's doable.
"Not if you actually understand finance and risk it isn't"
Well, I would hesitate admitting to knowing much about finance (despite holding a degree saying I supposedly do) but I'm pretty confident there are many people out there that really know their stuff and still find it fascinating
"Bitcoin is an interesting experiment in some ways but as a practical matter for real world use it's rather clumsy, risky and impractical. It's flawed in so many ways I barely know where to begin"
Flawed it is and undoubtedly so. But as far as practicality goes, there are use cases in which right now it is by far the most practical if not the only way to perform a few transactions. Sure many of those transactions are illegal (unethical is harder to define) and enabled by the existence of bitcoin but that's really now all it's about. Just like the internet is not only about porn, even though some people I'm sure only use it for that.
The windows update service is still stoppable from the services menu. What you lose with windows 10 is the ability to choose which updates you apply. So it's all or nothing
Unless of course you use wsus in a corporate environment
On the contrary, with an update roll-up every six months, controlled updating is easier than ever.
Simply turn updates off. It can be done. Then apply the new version of windows 10 if and when you want as an upgrade. Upgrading works quite well and you don't lose your existing settings like a complete reinstallation. At most you are six months behind at any given time. Big deal
For corporate environments, with pro windows and wsus the update control was never lost in the first place.
Honestly, I dread far more the situation with certain rolling linux distros where you upgrade with your fingers crossed each time, particularly if it has been a while since the last time. And its not like you can postopone upgrading forever because sooner or later you'll want to use a repository and the package manager to install something.
Tixati, preferably the portable edition Cross platform too, the real deal not like utorrent. Includes a very good web server and interface. I have mine visible on the internet so I can add torrents from anywhere, anytime
Star Wars takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far away". It's not even about humans, all races are "aliens". Of course they are played by English speaking humans cause that's how they could get the majority of the audience to relate (and also...no alien actors are available)
Star Trek... well I get the arguments about it being science fiction and that it dabbles philosophy and morality, but I once read about it being described as a soap opera in space and I found it rather fitting description. At least as far as the 90's series goes
I'm not a fan of either universe. Their movies make for pleasant pastime but that's about it.
It will teach him some fundamental concepts in low level programming while being a fun game. No assembly knowledge required (probably no programming at all) but knowing some as you say he does definately helps.
Now imagine if the blockchain were to increase by 60MB per hour (10MB blocks)...
I don't see bitcoin as a day to day transaction system. I agree that some people imply it can play that role but really it can't. And tbh I don't want it to. I can buy my coffee with ordinary currency, this is not the functionary gap bitcoin came to fill.
I want it to be a long term storage of value. Yes I know volatility is a problem but assuming this goes away.
I don't mind if I have to pay a few dollars even worth of fees for a transaction if it allows me to move say 1000 dollars worth anywhere I want with no limitations. This is something I might want to do a few times a year the most.
Is it for the rich then? Well perhaps. I guess if you are considering moving a few $1000s worth you are not starving and you can afford a reasonable fee. Bitcoin can be a valuable service. It doesn't have to be free, just not centrally reguliated.
The 7 transactions/sec apparently was too optimistic. Whatever it really is might truly not be enough even for the use case I am describing. I am not opposed to increasing the block size if there is no sensible alternative, but it must be a consensus move, not like it was done now
Each transaction has a few KB worth of data. You make a transaction of say 0.5 btc to an address. In a few seconds all nodes know about it, but it is not validated until it finds its way into a block
Miners choose a few of the unvalidated transactions to form a block and perform all the math needed to get a hash with the desirable characteristics (I wont expand on this here) They are more likely to choose transactions that pay the fee (which is optional and can vary in generosity) A new block is added to the blockchan network from the competing miners (whoever get the right hash faster). The difficulty of the right hash is adjusted every two weeks so that on average that happens every ten minutes
I had to say all that to explain the 1MB size. The way thigs are now, 1MB block size allows for about 7 transactions per second, so about 4200 per ten minute block. The size of the bitcoin quantities moved matters but does so relatively little so small transactions have relatively high cost in bandwidth (and bandwidth is what you pay for)
So imagine each block as a 4200 passenger seat train or plane. Thousands of passengers are waiting to get a seat. Some might get the next plane, other might get the next one or the one after. Naturaly, those that pay more will be guaranteed a seat while the freeloaders will be defered to the next one. As more candidate transactions appear all the time and paying ones get prioritized by the miners, some free or cheap ones will never get through and if a transaction doesnt get through in 48 hours (I think) it is simply dropped from the network like it never occured at all
So if nothing changes, people will simply avoid making pointless transactions of a few cents worth because the fees required to make them validated will not be worth it. If the block size increases, fees might not have to but the blockchain will continue to get bloated and so will bandwidth costs for nodes.
I prefer the former. We can always use other coins for small transactions and keep btc as the standard for longer term store of value
These are important features on servers, which is why server2012 (and r2) were significant upgrades to 2008 r2
But for the average user, and even power user (the desktops of professional admins not included) NIC teaming and software defined networks mean nothing. Hyper-V is only included on Pro (which is what average users who pay for their OS dont have) and even if they did have it would probably not care. Nor would they care what protocol is used for their file shares so long as it works. RFS (if you mean ReFS as I presume) might be the only feature of importance, again a server 2012 r2 feature (not windows 8/8.1) and only barely used since its still under development.
So for most users the only substantial difference is the slightly better speed, more recent driverbase (not really much to do with direct OS development) and the much worse UI. I can get over the UI but it baffles me why I have to do so on an otherwise perfectly good evolutionary upgrade
The sentence is obviously inaccurate and only meant to be funny. 32bit extensions to a 16bit OS would probably be accurate but it is funnier to go from 32 bit down by halving each time until you reach 2 bit and 1 bit where you can make the (clever IMO) puns. Two bit means worthless and one bit means the slightest so by that time we are no longer talking about computer bits.
Can''t believe I'm actually making a decent effort at explaining the joke!
It pains me to say it, being a Greek but I think it's the truth. In 50-60 years time there will be nobody left alive remembering a time (pre-euro) when this nation, with all its dysfunctions could at least pretty much support itself.
Greece should never have joined the euro. This is clear now. Our economy just wasn't strong enough for it and we cheated to get in. I remember it being common knowledge that we did so. I cannot believe that the eurozone did not know, they just pretended not to see.
This then opened the can of worms. Suddenly so much money was available. Banks literally begged to lend you. In the mean time, the economy disintegrated as one by one industries closed shop as they could not compete anymore. But borrowed money was plenty so life was good. Needless to say, no serious reforms were made and subsidy money was being squandered. It was obvious but nobody rang a bell at the time.
In 2009 things were bad but a newly elected Government managed to make things even worse. They lied to get elected (of course) and then strived to present the year's deficit as significantly higher than it actually was, thus bringing in the IMF. They also made sure NOT to accept a debt haircut and allowed debt to cross over to become debt to other nations as opposed to foreign banks, making a default all that much harder. In any self respecting country, this would be considered high treason. Instead, those people are still around, appearing on TV and running for office.
Nothing really changes until 2015 when we have a left-wing government for the first time. They utterly failed to negotiate and in 6 months have barely managed to govern at all as all the time is spent negotiating. It could very easily appear to be incompetence, and maybe to an extent it is, but seeing Germany's conduct these last few days, I believe they never really stood a chance. They were boycotted right from the get go and actually been asked to resign in favour of other "better suited" alternatives. Those who actually did nothing all those years before. Even the pretense of sovereign nations has been abandoned. Now the whole country is practically put on mortgage to finance a debt that simply cannot be financed.
Having seen this debacle, I now wish we had exited the euro even without preparation. I'd rather go hungry for a few years and live poorly for a lot longer than spend the rest of my life being considered a "lazy greek who wants to spend and get fat pensions and beg for money". When in fact I have never even had a loan, work as hard as any other "proper" european and will likely never get a pension at all. But I too will end up paying the price for other peoples crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't need to be IT, but a modicum of competence in their everyday tools of the trade is assumed and expected. And yes, computers ARE their tools of the trade as well. Not just ours.
Sadly they don't have that competence in so many cases. I have had to support so many users in various places that didn't even KNOW they had a username that came along with their password to log into their PCs. You see, they didn't have to type it every morning so they forgot it existed!
When someone is supposedly capable to drive a car for example, they cannot say they only know how to go up to third gear, can't change lanes and don't know how to park it because they only need to "drive" and make right turns to go wherever they need. Oh, and they only understand the stop sign. No other sign is needed.
Would it ever be OK because they are not a professional driver or a mechanic? It seems this sort of excuse is supposed to pass in an analogous IT scenario.
ANY 8 char password? Does that include special chars like ©?
If we include those, the number of possibilities increases immensely, to the point that I certainly wouldn't worry if I had such a password.
Most people, even on this thread seem to exclude even the common, easily accessible symbols from their strategy.
That is correct. But blockchain-based voting can still be useful and reduce voting costs.
Ideally, you would keep the requirement of showing up at the polls. You would verify your identity manually and be issued a private key on the spot with your smartphone, with a token to vote.
You would use that immediately in a terminal where you would cast that vote much like you scan a qr code and pay with a bitcoin address.
Later in the day, or the next day, you would verify your vote is included, in a similar way that you check bitcoin address activity on a block explorer.
This does not solve all problems but massively reduces the risks mentioned in the original post. Of course you can still have spouse coercion and stuff, like "show me who you voted" etc.
Crypto veterans and true enthusiasts have seen this happen before. The 2014 bear market lasted over 2 years. They are not worried.
It is disappointing however to see posts like this and the usual replies.
Those people mentioned taking loans or thinking about sticking it to the man are just pathetic and they deserve what they got. If it wasn't bitcoin, it would have been the dotcom bubble or something else.
Particularly the Korean woman who lost 90%. That could only have happened if she invested in shitcoins, probably expecting higher gains than typical.
When something goes parabolic, a heavy correction is inevitable and that is irrespective of the value of the asset, whatever you may think it is. Anyone who fails to understand basic concepts has no business investing in anything.
And again, nobody focuses on actually learning what the tech is about, how it can be useful and why. All they care about is making money fast and easy. I'm sorry it doesn't work that way and it's not bitcoin's fault. There is only one way this could go for people like them.
The others, who know why they put their money (not more than they can afford) into bitcoin and actually bothered reading up before doing so are not worried.
In the end, if you believe that bitcoin has a future and adoption will increase, today's marketcap is far too small, and (longterm) increase is inevitable.
If you believe it's just the latest craze and will die out, you should never invest a penny in it.
Given the whole mining frenzy that is still driving GPU prices to the moon (unlike the coins they are used to mine), if there ever was a time for a third contestant in this market, now should be it
What you really want is reactOS. Unfortunately, despite being in development for almost 20 years, it's practically unusable. Desktop OSes will probably become obsolete before it even comes out of alpha
You can't draw any conclusions about ownership distribution from addresses. They don't map to persons 1:1
First, many experienced users hold bitcoin in dozens of addresses each. They have different addresses in different wallets for different uses (storage, spending etc)
Second and most important, many of the huge amount addresses you see are actually exchange addresses. Exchange hold bitcoin for millions of people (if not millions by now, they are in the hundreds of thousands) but they consolidate them in just a handful of addresses.
That is assuming equality was ever the issue. Bitcoin and cryptos are disruptive, they take power from banks and give it to individuals (at least those that spend the time to learn how to actually use it effectively). While this may level the playfield in some ways, I doubt anyone explicitly said it leads to equality.
Bitcoin supporters are into it for the censorship resistance, the fact that it trancends nations, pseudonimity (NOT anonymity, though you can get that too if you try hard enough and involve other cryptos), trasparency in transactions (which is not incompatible with pseudonymity or even anonymity).
The media chooses to focus on criminals, energy waste and ponzi schemes, but I would not expect otherwise.
At the very least you should have been able to download the latest version 1703, burn the iso or make a bootable stick and reinstall, while keeping all apps and settings. It generally works, I've been updating this way for years
It still doesn't explain you you even got to this weird position where nothing works update-wise and it is the first time I hear of such a serious disability.
Is it a brand name laptop like dell or HP perhaps, where OS updating only works through their own specialized application?
What got us there was the cold war. Both from a symbolic perspective (can't let the commies beat us) and an actual fear perhaps.
Like whoever conquers space first has an advantage and can build orbital weapons and blast us to hell kind of thing. However silly it may sound today.
We are long past those notions. Presidents can no longer justify the significant costs when other more mundane matters are pressing and can win them votes.
Maybe this will change again in the future, with China, or maybe the private sector will have a real incentive big enough to drive investment towards that area.
I remember most of those names and some of the drama.
Sardu was a living legend. We were all hooked on his stuff and he was kind of a mystery figure. Most didn't even know his real name.
Glad to learn he is doing well
How come there is no movie adaptation of neuromancer? That's where the matrix name comes from.
It's probably no easy task to adapt it in a way that is both entertaining to a large audience and not disappointing to fans of the book at the same time, but I believe it's doable.
"Not if you actually understand finance and risk it isn't"
Well, I would hesitate admitting to knowing much about finance (despite holding a degree saying I supposedly do) but I'm pretty confident there are many people out there that really know their stuff and still find it fascinating
"Bitcoin is an interesting experiment in some ways but as a practical matter for real world use it's rather clumsy, risky and impractical. It's flawed in so many ways I barely know where to begin"
Flawed it is and undoubtedly so. But as far as practicality goes, there are use cases in which right now it is by far the most practical if not the only way to perform a few transactions.
Sure many of those transactions are illegal (unethical is harder to define) and enabled by the existence of bitcoin but that's really now all it's about.
Just like the internet is not only about porn, even though some people I'm sure only use it for that.
MS recently released an official update roll-up for win7 SP1, including all post SP1 updates up to May 2016 (I think)
They don't want to call it a SP because that would force them to increase the support deadline for the OS, which we know they don't want to do.
That in fact is the reason windows service packs have gone extinct, or at least are rebranded as other forms of cumulative updates.
Nothing for windows 8.x that I know of
The windows update service is still stoppable from the services menu.
What you lose with windows 10 is the ability to choose which updates you apply. So it's all or nothing
Unless of course you use wsus in a corporate environment
On the contrary, with an update roll-up every six months, controlled updating is easier than ever.
Simply turn updates off. It can be done. Then apply the new version of windows 10 if and when you want as an upgrade.
Upgrading works quite well and you don't lose your existing settings like a complete reinstallation.
At most you are six months behind at any given time. Big deal
For corporate environments, with pro windows and wsus the update control was never lost in the first place.
Honestly, I dread far more the situation with certain rolling linux distros where you upgrade with your fingers crossed each time, particularly if it has been a while since the last time. And its not like you can postopone upgrading forever because sooner or later you'll want to use a repository and the package manager to install something.
Tixati, preferably the portable edition
Cross platform too, the real deal not like utorrent.
Includes a very good web server and interface. I have mine visible on the internet so I can add torrents from anywhere, anytime
Stacking transistors vertically means less surface exposed to a heatsink.
Unless I misunderstand something about how cooling these chips works, how can this problem be overcome?
Star Wars takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far away".
It's not even about humans, all races are "aliens". Of course they are played by English speaking humans cause that's how they could get the majority of the audience to relate (and also...no alien actors are available)
Star Trek... well I get the arguments about it being science fiction and that it dabbles philosophy and morality, but I once read about it being described as a soap opera in space and I found it rather fitting description. At least as far as the 90's series goes
I'm not a fan of either universe. Their movies make for pleasant pastime but that's about it.
Not true.
Windows 7 will run just fine but the extra instructions of the new cpus will not be utilized
Check out this PC game.
http://www.gog.com/game/human_...
It will teach him some fundamental concepts in low level programming while being a fun game.
No assembly knowledge required (probably no programming at all) but knowing some as you say he does definately helps.
Now imagine if the blockchain were to increase by 60MB per hour (10MB blocks)...
I don't see bitcoin as a day to day transaction system. I agree that some people imply it can play that role but really it can't. And tbh I don't want it to. I can buy my coffee with ordinary currency, this is not the functionary gap bitcoin came to fill.
I want it to be a long term storage of value. Yes I know volatility is a problem but assuming this goes away.
I don't mind if I have to pay a few dollars even worth of fees for a transaction if it allows me to move say 1000 dollars worth anywhere I want with no limitations. This is something I might want to do a few times a year the most.
Is it for the rich then? Well perhaps. I guess if you are considering moving a few $1000s worth you are not starving and you can afford a reasonable fee. Bitcoin can be a valuable service. It doesn't have to be free, just not centrally reguliated.
The 7 transactions /sec apparently was too optimistic. Whatever it really is might truly not be enough even for the use case I am describing. I am not opposed to increasing the block size if there is no sensible alternative, but it must be a consensus move, not like it was done now
Each transaction has a few KB worth of data.
You make a transaction of say 0.5 btc to an address. In a few seconds all nodes know about it, but it is not validated until it finds its way into a block
Miners choose a few of the unvalidated transactions to form a block and perform all the math needed to get a hash with the desirable characteristics (I wont expand on this here)
They are more likely to choose transactions that pay the fee (which is optional and can vary in generosity)
A new block is added to the blockchan network from the competing miners (whoever get the right hash faster). The difficulty of the right hash is adjusted every two weeks so that on average that happens every ten minutes
I had to say all that to explain the 1MB size. The way thigs are now, 1MB block size allows for about 7 transactions per second, so about 4200 per ten minute block. The size of the bitcoin quantities moved matters but does so relatively little so small transactions have relatively high cost in bandwidth (and bandwidth is what you pay for)
So imagine each block as a 4200 passenger seat train or plane. Thousands of passengers are waiting to get a seat. Some might get the next plane, other might get the next one or the one after. Naturaly, those that pay more will be guaranteed a seat while the freeloaders will be defered to the next one. As more candidate transactions appear all the time and paying ones get prioritized by the miners, some free or cheap ones will never get through and if a transaction doesnt get through in 48 hours (I think) it is simply dropped from the network like it never occured at all
So if nothing changes, people will simply avoid making pointless transactions of a few cents worth because the fees required to make them validated will not be worth it.
If the block size increases, fees might not have to but the blockchain will continue to get bloated and so will bandwidth costs for nodes.
I prefer the former. We can always use other coins for small transactions and keep btc as the standard for longer term store of value
These are important features on servers, which is why server2012 (and r2) were significant upgrades to 2008 r2
But for the average user, and even power user (the desktops of professional admins not included) NIC teaming and software defined networks mean nothing.
Hyper-V is only included on Pro (which is what average users who pay for their OS dont have) and even if they did have it would probably not care.
Nor would they care what protocol is used for their file shares so long as it works.
RFS (if you mean ReFS as I presume) might be the only feature of importance, again a server 2012 r2 feature (not windows 8/8.1) and only barely used since its still under development.
So for most users the only substantial difference is the slightly better speed, more recent driverbase (not really much to do with direct OS development) and the much worse UI.
I can get over the UI but it baffles me why I have to do so on an otherwise perfectly good evolutionary upgrade
The sentence is obviously inaccurate and only meant to be funny.
32bit extensions to a 16bit OS would probably be accurate but it is funnier to go from 32 bit down by halving each time until you reach 2 bit and 1 bit where you can make the (clever IMO) puns.
Two bit means worthless and one bit means the slightest so by that time we are no longer talking about computer bits.
Can''t believe I'm actually making a decent effort at explaining the joke!
It pains me to say it, being a Greek but I think it's the truth.
In 50-60 years time there will be nobody left alive remembering a time (pre-euro) when this nation, with all its dysfunctions could at least pretty much support itself.
Greece should never have joined the euro. This is clear now. Our economy just wasn't strong enough for it and we cheated to get in. I remember it being common knowledge that we did so. I cannot believe that the eurozone did not know, they just pretended not to see.
This then opened the can of worms. Suddenly so much money was available. Banks literally begged to lend you. In the mean time, the economy disintegrated as one by one industries closed shop as they could not compete anymore. But borrowed money was plenty so life was good.
Needless to say, no serious reforms were made and subsidy money was being squandered. It was obvious but nobody rang a bell at the time.
In 2009 things were bad but a newly elected Government managed to make things even worse. They lied to get elected (of course) and then strived to present the year's deficit as significantly higher than it actually was, thus bringing in the IMF. They also made sure NOT to accept a debt haircut and allowed debt to cross over to become debt to other nations as opposed to foreign banks, making a default all that much harder.
In any self respecting country, this would be considered high treason. Instead, those people are still around, appearing on TV and running for office.
Nothing really changes until 2015 when we have a left-wing government for the first time. They utterly failed to negotiate and in 6 months have barely managed to govern at all as all the time is spent negotiating.
It could very easily appear to be incompetence, and maybe to an extent it is, but seeing Germany's conduct these last few days, I believe they never really stood a chance. They were boycotted right from the get go and actually been asked to resign in favour of other "better suited" alternatives. Those who actually did nothing all those years before. Even the pretense of sovereign nations has been abandoned.
Now the whole country is practically put on mortgage to finance a debt that simply cannot be financed.
Having seen this debacle, I now wish we had exited the euro even without preparation. I'd rather go hungry for a few years and live poorly for a lot longer than spend the rest of my life being considered a "lazy greek who wants to spend and get fat pensions and beg for money". When in fact I have never even had a loan, work as hard as any other "proper" european and will likely never get a pension at all. But I too will end up paying the price for other peoples crimes.