I'm really happy to not see much partisanship here but because I hear it elsewhere a lot, I'd just like to get in ahead of the "party P was doing great but then party Q screwed it all up" argument.

Australian internet was not great but just OK before any of this NBN nonsense. Then along came the politicians with an appetite for takeover. The first of them had a big vision of top-down design, "everyone" gets fibre of some flavour (this isn't quite true but is largely accurate for the sake of argument), accompanied by economic growth fantasies like "now all the lawyers and doctors and researchers can move to the country but it'll totally work because they can send each other GB data files all day long!) all the while being totally ignorant of time and cost. Both of these had blown out before the change of Government.

Then the Government did change and costs had to be reined in. So suddenly anyone who had (relatively expensive) HFC internet would not see any improvement and instead be rebranded into a NBN success story. (Indeed, the end-user experience of cable has mostly declined with more drop-outs and less back-haul.) Most people have better than before DSL, but still some kind of (somewhat flaky) synchronous DSL to a "node" somewhere within a kilometer or two of the house. So now we're tens of billions in the hole and everyone's internet is largely similar to before.

Meanwhile 5G mobile telephony is amazing, and some crazy billionaire is planning an even more audacious disruption.

I was an IBM/Lenovo fanboy until three things happened:
1. My X1 Carbon Gen4 was not as good as usually expected. Also some important parts were not up to spec in comparison to similar products from competitors (e.g. CPU was lower spec).
2. Eventually support was needed, and it stank. I had paid for premium support, yet it took about a month to get a keyboard fixed. This fix was also not good enough. (New parts noticeably lower quality than the original.)
3. I was given a reasonably modern Dell when I started a new job. It is amazing. Up to spec. Light. Resilient. Decent keyboard. Now the sticker price is very high, but when the Lenovo finally keels over I will consider a high priced Dell.

Get the government out of education by privatising/deregulating, allowing competitors to fight to offer the best quality education at the lowest prices.

A government feeding and clothing your children is not a sign of a prosperous society but a sign of poverty and control. Why then do you want them (mis)educating all children?

Where is the left wing crying "censorship"? Censorship is bad no matter who does it.

Amen!
Dirty liberals and their double standards. ;-)

FIAT currency tends to be *backed* by something, like an economy, like USA or European Union or even China. What is this backed by?

Wrong. An economy is not a backing. It does encourage confidence that the notes of debt may be exhanged of goods or services in the future, but a backing is a guarantee (e.g. hard assets) and an economy is not a guarantee.

FIAT currency tends to be *backed* by something

WRONG! Fiat currencies may or may not be backed by something: fiat means mandated by law. Coincidentally, fiat currencies are almost never backed by anything. (Why would this be the case I wonder?)

Currency is IOU notes that devalue over time. It is not a hard asset, like coal or copper

Money, and not currency, should be:

• Easily divisible
• Fungible
• Easily verified
• A store of value

Your currency might be IOU notes that devalue over time, but this does not have to be the case. Gresham's law is often paraphrased as, "Bad money drives out good." Good money is out there, and smart people are storing their wealth in something other than government mandated and systemically devalued currency. You can keep collecting something that the government can counterfeit apparently without consequence to itself, but definitely with consequence to its citizens.

Back to Bitcoin: it may provide all of the qualities of money listed above (the only item in question is a store of value). If you look back to the early colonies of what is now the United States of America you will see that fiat currencies worked -- because their supply was limited and they held their value. In this way, because Bitcoin is guaranteed to have a limited supply, they could be the only modern example of an unbacked currency (fiat or non-fiat) to be a safe store of value.

So basically, this is like "collector items", not currency. A very scare "resource", if you can call it that. You get 50 BTC after few months, meaning that basically you've just spent $50 in electricity to get your "free" money.

It is often said that a Bitcoin is a store of work which is incorrect. It may take work to "mine" one (your mention of electricity consumption) but the value of a Bitcoin is not a function of the input: it is a function of its rarity and its usefulness (supply and demand). The cost of "mining" Bitcoins is not irrelevant, but is simply an expense in an individuals decision to enter the market for Bitcoins.

Anyway, another fad "currency". Might as well collect "ISK in eveonline" or "gold nuggets in WoW" - same thing.

These do not have guarantees on their supply. Also, they have little usefulness outside the virtual world. Bitcoins may not have a well demonstrated usefulness, but it does meet the requirements for general commerce in the real world. There is already a functioning economy trading in Bitcoin (albeit small) and the fact that its value is 1 USD today means that it will be much higher in the future as the economy supporting Bitcoin grows (and as the US declines *ducks*).

Lesson: your "money" is really currency; Bitcoin may indeed be money. Also, this is all before exploring the additional benefits of Bitcoin: anonymity of transactions (if chosen) and the inability of any individual (or government) to control or exploit the supply.

Agent provocateur?

It's called democracy in action.

If you thought he got a lot of pussy now, just wait until he's on the silver screen, running from the Department of Defense like Harrison Ford in Patriot Games; chasing leads and evading trained killers like Liam Neeson in Taken; his loose hair moving around his face like Johnny Depp!

Call me. Steve not knowing what he's doing could only last so long.

If you want a long-term technology-business-plan, you're new-tech is out-of-touch-tech.

But they forgot to mention Mars warming.

If you are designing anything bigger than a couple of gigabytes, you are in for some fun (or your users are). ;-)

To be a good designer, there is no substitute for a thorough understanding of the subject matter. And you are a self-confessed n00b. Get an expert. Or study. Hard.

Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners.

Never bought one. My brother (non-nerd) did and it had RAM errors manifesting as BSODs within weeks of delivery.

The laptops were always cheap. They "check all the boxes": i.e. they have all the on-paper credentials to compete with other manufacturers, on paper. But the build quality is crap.

Also I had one loaned to me for work and the keyboard's enter key stopped working, so I carried an enormous USB keyboard around with it for 3 months. ;-)

Never. Buy. Dell.

The original Christian distribution: Jesux!

How much did the Government sell Telstra for in the first place? ;-)

There's no point sending any spam, if not your estimated 30 million messages, only to collapse the server and not relay the messages to the recipients.

The botnet operators probably think of this as an optimization problem and not good manners.

Are those living in tyranny without the safeguard of sufficient imaginary property rights!
Never mind protected civil liberties: the new fight is for imaginary liberty!