Info from GSMArena -

LG Optimus Black P970
Announced 2011, January
Status Available. Released 2011, May

You're talking about a 3 year old phone that retailers are still trying to clear old stock of.

Exactly! just like how we bailed out the banks... /facepalm

What if the private entity is the only choice for the people (e.g. a monopoly)? What difference does it make that the private entity, or the government is doing the actual censoring?

Baidu has an almost non-existent marketshare outside of China, so basically whatever they do don't affect the US population much.

However, let's suppose it was Google (with it's marketshare in controlling access to information) censoring result due to political reasons - lets say they blacklisted "Tea Party" or "Gay Marriage" from their searches. Ok, you say Google isn't a monopoly, so what about Microsoft in the late 90s. What if they implemented a filter in IE that stopped those words from being displayed for the same reasons.

Yes, it may not be a first amendment issue, but it is a valid issue nevertheless. Just because the censorship is not being done by Government, doesn't make it right. If you know anything about tort law, you would know about the various duties of care an organization might have towards not only their customers, but also the public.

Maybe I should have added, in the US.

As big part of Independence was to reject corporations like EIC and the Hudson Bay Company which operated private armies sanctioned by the host nation (such as the British or the Dutch).

Corporations have grown to a size that the power and influence it has over the public is comparable to government, if not surpassing it.

What good is the first amendment if private entities providing essential information services to the public can effective bypass the right for people to be heard?

Carter was a good president, probably the one of the best, that just happened to be not as good at politics.

We developed a complete string of measures to prevent that from happening again. This requires public oversight and a certain amount of state control. However, the whole point of Bitcoin (originally, as proposited by S. Nakamoto) is the cut the state out from the equation, reverting to the previous state. So the question is, what can we do to provide the same amount of safeguard we have now for cryptocurrencies, without changing it's very nature?

The UK border force demeaning? They're angels compared to the ones in the US!

The UK wasn't like this before. The system has been Americanized. Before 1998, there were no tuition fees for public universities (All top UK Universities are public), but afterwards (apart from Scotland) this was increased first to ~£1000, then ~£3000, and now to variable fees with a £9000 cap.

The government still has to spend similar amounts of money to back these loans, so in the end, the whole reason for introducing this change in policy is because this spending is classified differently in budget. It is a graduate tax in all but name, however, administered in a more complex fashion.

It depends on whether the insurance is a fixed payment, or a payment for damages. If you get a lump-sum payout on an event triggering the payout, it is usually stackable. If it is for damages to property or for cost to remedy a problem, then the policy usually is not stackable.

Yes, I see your point and I agree completely. However, does the small number of benefits that Bitcoin have over gold weighed against the benefits of gold over Bitcoin, justify the use of Bitcoin? Why not just trade in gold instead? (Aside from the obvious fact that the Gold bubble has burst and gold bugs need something else to hype up)

That's the advertised ask/bid prices, but what is actually available on the market? Take a look at the ask/bid volume charts and you see that a lot of the times, there is only 1BTC or less keeping those ask/bid prices that close. When you go above those small volumes, the spread increases dramatically. This is mostly due to the absence of market makers. With market makers you get a more consistent spread, but the spread would also be bigger (market maker profits).

Um no... the 7tps artificial limit can be removed. The real limiting factor is the size of the blocks that records the acutal transactions.

The 10tps limit due to the max size of the blocks (at 1MB). The average tranaction size is 166bytes. 600 seconds in 10 minutes (average time for each block)

1,000,000/166 = 6024.096385542
6024.096385542/600 = 10.040160643

So the end result is roughtly 10tps.

You can increase the 1MB limit, but then the blockchain gets very big very fast. Right now it is nearly 13GB. Due to the interest in Bitcoins in 2013 (or maybe Satoshi dice), 9GB was added to the blockchain in the past year alone.

To get the same 25000tps performance, you would need to increase the max for each block to 2.5GB (2500MB).

If all you're trying to do is to get rid of fiat, then we already have gold (and currencies that can be backed by gold). The gold standard was dropped for good reason.