Bitcoin is not actually deflationary. Its supply grows constantly until it eventually stabilises. The fact that Bitcoin prices have fallen a lot is more because lots of new people have discovered the project and decided they want some, but that effect will eventually peter out as Bitcoin becomes boring and everyone finalises their opinions of it.

Greece doesn't need fiat currency. What Greece needs is hard money – like the Euro (which is hard-ish, though not as hard as Bitcoin). This is because the Greek government is notoriously corrupt and the fact that they couldn't just print the pensions of their civil servants was one of the few things creating pressure to reform, and preventing outright pillaging of the savings of Greeks who do actually work in the private sector. Seeing Greece as one monolithic entity isn't right: there are different factions, not all of whom want the government to suddenly be able to spend whatever it wants. Hence the Greek people apparently voting for both keeping the Euro and not enacting any spending cutbacks, a contradictory position.

Ultimately Greece is going to get a lot poorer, no matter what. In many ways it's practically a third world country, one that was simply kept afloat by huge injections of foreign cash. But it never really stopped being third world in the way that it was run.

Bitcoin could, theoretically, benefit some Greek people now in the heat of the crisis because the Greek government wouldn't be able to impose capital controls on it. Thus preventing the outright theft of whatever little cash Greek's have left in the bank (sorry, I mean, solidarity tax/haircut/pick euphemism of choice). It is no magical cure for Greece's problems but it could tip the balance away from a government that discovered it was paying salaries and pensions for entirely non-existent departments, and towards people who are just trying to make a living.

I think silver has been a reasonable competitor to gold as a commodity metal. The Romans used it, I'm pretty sure the Pound Sterling is called that for a reason, the Americans used it, etc.

It was probably because its much lower scarcity that it was used as "change" versus higher denomination/value coinage made from gold.

Lots of things can be considered an API. For instance, who owns the copyright on OpenGL? Does anyone even know? What about HTTP? After all, a protocol is basically an API that runs over wires instead of call stacks. And HTTP/2.0 is a derivative work of SPDY which is .... developed by Google. And is now being added back into Java. What about SQL? It's managed by ISO these days so probably Oracle would avoid slicing their own throats like this.

Following this US ruling all sorts of people and companies are now finding that they own IP they never even knew they had. This is already making lawyers the world over start licking their lips. It's going to be a shitstorm.

Of course they will (and do). They want their customers to have a great experience so they don't go to the competition. Hence the ability to review drivers, hence the automated calculation of the trip cost and so on.

Tell me about the time in the last 2500 years when gold wasn't valuable.

It has a value which has fluctuated over time, but it never seems to become valueless, either because of its history as a means of exchange, its intrinsic value as a material, or both.

It's systematically ignoring laws and regulations while going "wah wah, we're teh underdogs".

Uber is not unregulated and they do not stand in opposition to regulations in general, contrary to what many seem to believe.

What we're witnessing here is not State Vs Anarchy Round One. What we're witnessing is quite simply State Regulation vs Corporate Regulation. The existential question Uber faces is, can they convince society and government (not the same thing) that they're better at regulating taxi drivers via their technology than local taxi commissions are via paperwork? Even if Uber triumphs, this will not mean widespread usage of unregulated taxis, it just means that taxi drivers will live in fear of getting low star ratings instead of having their local medallion revoked.

Getting drunk and running amok is something you do when not home--at home you might exercise some moderation, or there'd be people who'd call you out on it whose authority you'd feel obligated to respect

I hate to say it, given that I'm British, but unfortunately the problem of a subset of Brits getting completely wasted and engaging in shitty, boorish behaviour isn't something restricted to holiday times. For some reason the UK just has a far more serious problem with drinking than other cultures and it happens at home as well. I normally don't go to the sort of European resort towns that the hooligan set like to frequent but on the occasions that I have done, it's always embarrassing as fuck to be a young male British tourist because you can sense the suspicion locals have that you might be about to do something stupid. The worst was when I visited Bratislava. Lovely city (well, town, by UK standards). The pub in the city centre had the phone number of the British embassy on the beer mats, for people to call in an emergency. The men's toilets had a poster warning Brits specifically not to hit on the local girls. When I was there, a group of Brits came in with some unbelievably grotesque, obese men being led by some extremely hot local girl. Very obviously a stag do. As one of the fattest guys walked past the table where me and my friend were sitting he said (very loudly) "I want to see some TITS".

I pretended to be Canadian. Luckily I don't have a strong British accent at all and I was travelling with an American, so it was somewhat plausible.

I think you're completely right that this behaviour is partly learned and transmitted, like some sort of mind virus. For some reason Brits seem far more likely than other people to feel they can't have fun or be socially relaxed until they've got drunk, and will happily admit it. It's not seen as something shameful, people just blurt it out, like saying it somehow makes them one of the group. Combine it with a culture that practically celebrates "laddishness" as being fundamental to being a man, and you've got a recipe for trouble.

I think I've run into a couple of dystopian stories which involve a resurgence of coal usage.

Some are kind of post-ecological failure, where the population lives in domed cities and is energy dependent to keep the domes functioning. I think one involved a crisis several years into a continent-wide drought that required a massive desalination and pumping project to prevent literally running out of water.

It's the preferred location for exiling troublesome political figures with French ties.

I kind of wanted it to go up in flames not because I think ACA was perhaps one of the worst economic giveaways since the Pacific Railroad Acts of the 1860s.

Basically we just ended up enshrining the for-profit healthcare industry, including the insurance companies, into law, forever. Sure, there were some goodies in there for people with pre-existing conditions and a handful of other things, but my sense is that it really didn't do anything to address the out-of-control costs of healthcare or the relentless profiteering WITHIN healthcare.

Unfortunately I don't think any of this can be fixed without going single payer and greatly stripping the profiteering out of healthcare by making most of it nonprofit.

ACA just says "well, we're just going to make more people buy healthcare and hope it makes it cheaper because a bunch of healthy people won't use it" without even beginning to address all the people who WILL use it more now (thanks to some of the goodies) at the current, high-profit, high-cost expense levels.

Did you ever check out Microsoft Research's Singularity OS, which implemented a new OS kernel from scratch in a dialect of C#. It has no traditional processes and relies on software/compiler enforced isolation instead of VMM/page tables. It has some other rather interesting ideas in it too, like contract based IPC channels. Relatedly, there was some work done a while ago to allow better integration between garbage collected heaps and the kernel swap system (bookmarking collectors), but the patches were never merged. Do you have any thoughts on how Linux could better support non-C/C++ based software in this way?

I wonder if that's a case of misleading by proportion.

It reduces the nonfunctional material in the battery by 80%, but what portion of the battery is nonfunctional material?

If a 100kg battery has 5kg nonfunctional material, losing 80% of it is nice, but you're only losing 4% of the total mass. The same kind of thing goes for volume. If the battery is 1000cc and the nonfunctional material is 50cc, losing 80% is great but its a much smaller part of the entire volume.

I'd guess that this is why the bigger claims are from process improvement. If it meaningfully shrunk mass and volume, they'd probably wave that flag, too.

Where did you buy it?

Also, I assume the battery has some kind of charge controller integrated into it so that it was a direct replacement for a regular lead acid battery.

Eventually being Amish is going to be a preferable (without the religion part) way to live. Low tech is future privacy tech.

They'll try to take that away, too, by polling other Amish who claim you aren't Amish.

Although generally it's an interesting idea, and I wonder if anyone has actually tried "becoming Amish" (without actually being Amish) as a way of going off the grid in a way that doesn't draw attention because it fits some "known" role of people living off the grid.

Probably would have prevented Satoshi being anonymous when he launched bitcoin.org, and thus might have led to Bitcoin never existing at all.