Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
I commented elsewhere in this thread theorising that Satoshi could be the work of both Finney and Back. If that has any basis in reality, then it stands to reason that perhaps the wallet is locked away in a trust or at least legally unobtainable until certain conditions are met (e.g. Adam Back's passing). I can imagine a scenario in the future where a law firm makes a press release confirming they're in possession of Satoshi's wallet and have been instructed to liquidate and donate its proceeds.
Your aside suggests you might already have considered what I'm about propose, but why not Finney and Back both as Satoshi?
The reporting already establishes all three parties (Satoshi being the third) were familiar/friendly with one another. The reporting says that Finney was the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction, which seems like a completely natural thing to do if the two of you are working together.
Finney's name also rises to the top in a few of the author's analysis, while also noting:
> "But his analysis had been hampered by the fact that most of Mr. Back’s papers were coauthored with other cryptographers, which made it difficult to know who really wrote them."
Again, why not both of them as Satoshi?
Hal Finney's passing also helps explain how such a monumental secret of Satoshi's identity has remained a secret for so long. The only other person who's in on the secret is Back himself.
Edit: To add further conjecture, it wouldn't surprise me if Satoshi's wallet is locked away in a trust or tied up with Finney's estate. I can imagine a scenario where the keys to the wallet are legally unobtainable until such time that both Finney and Back have passed, at which point the wallet is liquidated and its proceeds donated (Finney previously raised money for ALS research).
No evidence, just imagination. Reading the article was my first time learning about these people, so I'm unlikely to contribute anything new to the discourse that hasn't already been debated and scrutinised ad infinitum. I did find this person's post[1] to be the most compatible with what I had in mind when I made my original comment, in case you're looking for a more substantive viewpoint.
I do think there's something to my idea that the reason we haven't seen any activity from Satoshi's wallet is because it's being held in some sort of trust. An individual might not go to the trouble of setting something like that up, but a collective might be more inclined to do so. I haven't seen anyone else float this line of reasoning before and it seems to make more sense than the prevailing theories.
> A company having slightly lower margins does not seem like an actual issue. It doesn't even sound like they would end up loosing money on this device just lower their own margin.
It's more than just lower margins though, sounds like they're chowing through whatever stockpile of binned A18 chips they had earmarked for the Neo and once they're gone, they're gone.
Replenishing A18 stock comes with the opportunity cost of sacrificing TSMC production to manufacture more A18s, but because they're using binned chips in the Neo, a fresh manufacturing run will produce A18s in whatever ratio that splits good chips with binned chips. Apple has no need for good A18s anymore, so they'll need to make a choice whether to handicap the chip so newer Neos match the marketed specifications and performance characteristics of other Neos of the same generation OR release a lacklustre out-of-cycle update to the Neo.
Sounds like a logistical nightmare to be honest. They've been producing iPhones for nearly two decades now, their supply chain forecasts must be so well tuned to be almost perfect. That is, until the Neo.
How did that possibility even get past Tim Cook, THE supply chain guy? Seems entirely predictable, if not preventable. The sales really exceeded their expectations that much?
> The sales really exceeded their expectations that much?
Windows 11 demands TPM 2.0 which means that your old laptop may not be upgradable and yet support for Windows 10 has dropped. And add in a dash enshittification via AI and no real local login options.
There were a lot of people who were looking for a new laptop just as Apple dropped this.
How could Apple predict Microsoft shooting itself in both feet and the head right before they dropped a really nice cheap laptop?
I mean, it occasionally happens. Predictions are by definition not set in stone. I think there were a few iPhone generations that underestimated demand in China, a few iPhone models that overestimated, I think the 5c was the most notable.
It was only a few years ago that they offered all of their Stadia subscribers a full refund for every dollar they ever spent on the platform. By this point their reputation for customer service was well and truly known, but colour me surprised when I received a not insignificant sum credited to my bank account from Google.
I saw it mentioned in a comment elsewhere in this thread, but the level of service you get really seems dependant on which pocket of Google is responsible for the product you happen to be using. Unfortunately Workspace is a giant pocket with many billions of users with suboptimal and/or perpetually exhausted support.
I started playing World of Warcraft at the same time I was studying database systems at university and had a similar curiosity. Twenty years later the AzerothCore project pretty much satisfies this curiosity, they've done an incredible job reverse engineering the game server and its database.
That’s fascinating. I didn’t realize the WoW server was so database heavy. do you know if the original game logic was implemented mostly in stored procedures, or was it just used for persistence and the engine handled the rules elsewhere?
It's not, no. The data you see in these files is reconstituted from the data that shipped with the game client, but they're not a perfect match for the real data.
The game servers are all C++ and don't use stored procedures for general gameplay management. They do handle inventory management so that item duping is generally not possible, and complex things like cross-server character transfer use stored procedures.
Not to sound like a broken record, but I need to echo what many other replies have already said: great article.
Embarassingly, despite thinking of myself as pretty knowledgeable with SQL, I had no idea you could nest DML statements inside a CTE. I always assumed/used DML statements as the final statement after a CTE was defined. I'm not sure if or when I might use this in the future, but it's neat to learn something new (and to be humbled at the same time).
reply