He was convicted of a crime (assuming his guilt was established correctly) and the case was overturned on a 'venue' law, so, why the fck does anyone care about this exactly? That a douche tries to one-up his haters? If I wanted that, I'd read more Rob Ford. That's a guy with actual train-wreck entertainment value.

Airline pilots. They do basically nothing besides takeoff and landing and are required to be attentive 100% of the time.

The field of programming is only getting larger, so making programming easier for the people you're working with oen way or another will not help by shoving them into the gutter. The better route is to support and foster better static an anlysis so at least when they shoot themselves in the foot, they (or you) can see why it happened.

Nah, I always see it the other way, every article released about bitcoin is like "xxxx is the year of the linux Desktop" and every single article pumps up reasons why bitcoin will suddenly take the world by storm, but nothing else changes. Bitcoin is a commodity that a few bit players will continue to play withg it and the general public won't know or give a fuck about until someone gets defrauded for their entire life savings for some reason (most likely due to their own ignorance). Then politicians will knee jerk and do something drastic (like banning online gambling in the US a few years back) and it'll continue to suck the life out of a concept that is frankly destined to fail.

Much of the value from startups comes from a group of bright people getting together and creating something (mostly an idea, but implementation is important). If you just have random people chiming in online, you lose a lot of the creativity and feel that comes from being in person. Can you have a startup purely online? Sure, but it just makes things that much harder. Oh, and a nice office with wizz bang decore attracts VC money.

And you'll have pretty much the same result. The Valley is successful because its a self-fulfilling prophesey.

1. Startups go to the valley to because there's a ton of successful ex-startups and they want to be the next one
2. Investors go to the valley because there are a ton of successful ex-startups and they hope to jump into the next one.
3. Startups become successful (in part) because they have a large amount of available investment capital

Rinse and repeat. Unless startups start getting amazingly big without deep pocket books, or the valley becomes just so unworkable that they can't sustain the costs (still a decade away assuming no dramatic bubble popping incidents I'd say) people will continue to gravitate there and be successful. There will always be startups in every non-trivially sized city, but unless they can garner big bankrolls for growth and talent aquisition, its hard to see penetrating into the market largely enough to be 'huge successes' like their valley counterparts seem to.

A few facts that aren't going away any time soon:
1. There are 1000 different e-wallet based solutions which are swiss cheese of compatibility with the few number of retailers that have even bothered to look into them (These have fees as well mind you, just possibly less than CC transactions)
2. There are many loyalty reward cards / apps that do what you want quite well but only for specific customer/retailer relationships
3. Easy solutions that are both ubiquitous/cheap/secure would basically require the entire industry to jump onto a single standard who's fee schedule is really low / non-profit and who's infrastructure services / equipment are interchangable

If its not easy, customers will just use Credit Cards or cash
If its not ubiquitous, you may as well just use a rewards/points card program
If its not cheap, retailers may was well use credit cards because at least its a system well understood and comfortable with
If its not secure, retailers are on the hook for fraud and it will likely not be ubiquitous because which retailer would want to carry large purchase liability

All in all, its a 'solution' that on a green field may work. The articles frankly a utopian paradise where the slightly cheaper solution would require the entire infrastructure of our retail commerce system to be ripped out and replaced overnight in order to be feasible.

Lastly, by far the most important facet of any of these schemes is TRUST. If you don't have consumer trust in your transaction products, you won't have consumer buy-in. Loyalty cards have the maximum loss of whatever you've refilled them. CC/Bank cards generally have historically adequite means of limiting liability of holders (at the expense of retailers). What does this new system have to verify that my cash is safe with them?

If I wanted my fucking browser to look like Chrome, guess what? I woud've switched to Chrome a long time ago. Now I get an update today and it looks like crap.. sigh. Where's the 'don't touch my old fucking settings because i'm a hating curmudgeon' button, because I think its time for it.

1. Isn't actually true. You need to stay well within the lines or draw the ire and lawsuits from Oracle
2. Isn't true because you need to to be licensed by Oracle in order to be verified as 'compatible' and if they say no then guess what?
3. Yup, that's pretty much the only route you have

Tell that to Apache Harmony. Oracle refuses to make the certification 100% free / license un-encumbered, so here we are. You can't release a 'Java' runtime without certification, and you can't be certified unless you sign contracts with Oracle to bend over the barrel.

I have a solution, at least in part. Have a circle of trust so that:
1. You can only play if you know people in the service (or at least have a few very notable seed individuals which dev's trust)
2. If an individual is reported (and verified) as cheating, have a non-trivial penalty on the individual(s) who are in said friend group
3. If the upstream peer continues to be penalized for their peer's cheating, they can choose to drop their association essentially stopping the other guy from playing (unless they have other upstream peers willing to support them)

The system relies on a person knowing others, which is a hassle in the video gam troll world, but it means there's truely a penalty for not just players, but their peers as well. As a cheat provider, you'd be less likely to target said system, because the cheaters will be soon weeded out of the 'good players' pool

Just a first swipe on the idea, enjoy.

And what happens if the Arbiter sends both replies to the block chain? Who 'win's?

And every time I see a card for Ultraviolet or Apple digital copies, I throw the crap in the garbage. Until the day I can go to 'insert distributor here' and download a clean copy of the original movie, I'd rather just use DVD rippers or torrents to get a digital copy of the movies I 'own'.

Meh, Origin's crap and I haven't played an EA game in over a year because of it. If they release on Steam, I'd consider it.

The 10 people affected by this bus imrovement went out to celebrate but were hit by a car going twice the speed limit.. Oh the humanity!

Seriously though, I like to consider my needs a non-professional leading on the bleeding edge (2x 2560x1440's) But I don't even own a thunderbolt port, and unless some amazing peripherals come along to change my use case, I don't see that changing soon.

All I want is:
      1. standard bus standard which can drive anything
      2. said connector/cabling comes in 3 sizes from really really tiny cell phone variety to honking large clicking in connector that can't break
      3. That is future expandible to whatever for the next 10 years minimum
      4. No IP which prevents competition in said space except for standards bodies who's potfolios are both fair and unbiased in licensing terms
      Addendum I. Monster cables is specifically banned from ever producing said cables for ever
Nice to have's
      5. Fibre option
      6. Broadcast based networking support
      7. Bus QOS control
      8. Standard descriptive naming (NO BS marketing names like super-speed, hyper-active speed, high definition bandwidth, etc. )
      9. Support host wake/power-on
    10. Support at least bi-directional communications so I can plug in Bluetooth/IR/Wifi/etc.. message receivers and have if not chipset, at least OS support for pluggable and routable support for input methods without BS proprietary support all over the place