It is just a way of trying to shirk his responsibility. Push it off on to the voters and then wring your hands as though there was nothing to be done. He knows, even if there was time, the voters would say no.

Follow shady looking links for "free" money!

That right there succinctly shows the mentality of those who support Bitcoin better than anything else.

So overall the fast results are what we want out of a search engine- the answer.

This. Giving me the correct answer doesn't count as "anti-competitive", it means doing their job well.

I don't go to Google to save me typing in "www.m-w.com" and then searching for a word - I go to Google because it gives me more useful answers than searching directly on almost any specific site. Merriam-Webster considers itself too digified to define "blumpkin" for me; UrbanDictionary has no such qualms. UD doesn't do so well in explaining "Pepe" to me - KnowYourMeme has the whole history of it even giving credit to the original author. None of the above has a good definition for "Mary Sue", but TV Tropes nails it.

But, instead of searching on MW... Then UD... Then KYM... Then TT, and then who knows what else - I can just type it into Google, and bam! It gives me exactly what I wanted to know, and often does so faster than most ad-riddled pages can even load.

Companies need to quit whining about free exposure, and instead focus on doing their own jobs well. If anyone really want to vanish from the Googleable internet, they always have the option of setting noindex/nofollow on their pages. Huh, I don't see many of these righteously indignant sites doing that, I wonder why not?

Wu claims Google's first informational result is a "search result", rather than differentiating between content and information searches. Google isn't providing its own result first; it's providing an answer to a semantic question.

There are three types of searches: Official contact (what is the home page of Microsoft?); research (find me a bunch of information about lions); and simple information (what time is it in Brazil?). Google often gives any simple query related to a particular entity an Official Contact result first (e.g. searching for Windows 10 will give you the Microsoft page for Windows 10 first), and starts with a Simple Information result if the search looks informational (e.g. what is the national animal of Scotland?).

Wu fails to differentiate, instead seeing a search engine as a research platform: if you ask for any topic, you are asking for a library of writings on the topic, rather than trying to find a specific and utterly small piece of information.

Part of the issue in the Eurozone is that countries have control of fiscal policy, as in how money is spent and taxes collected, but not monetary policy, as in how much money is supplied and to where.

While monetary policy doesn't let you magic your way out of any situation (see Zimbawbe for an example) it can be useful. Have a currency that is weak or strong isn't inherently good and bad, but rather useful in different ways. So one country might wish to have a weaker currency, another a stronger one. Also it can allow for things such as higher inflation, which can be a problem, but can also be useful in some situations.

It wouldn't solve Greece's problem, to be sure, but there are ways it could potentially help.

Trying to push bitcoin only shows that the author has a poor understanding and an agenda. While you could, potentially, argue bitcoin in cases where a country's currency has collapsed, or is unable to be used to buy things from other countries. Bitcoin is highly volatile, a very poor store of wealth, but it is something you can spend and transfer, in some places at least, and at present it has value.

Well, that isn't an issue with the Euro. It is an extremely important and widely used currency, second only to the US Dollar. All Eurozone countries use it (by definition) which is quite a few major economies. As such it is also widely sought after in international currency exchanges. Euros are very easy to spend on the international scale. Many places will take them directly, and any bank will convert them.

Also the Euro is pretty stable. When you look at it compared to other major currencies like the Dollar, Pound, and the Yen it compares very well. All fluctuate, of course, but not very quickly. So it is a good store of value, you don't have to worry about losing your money. Works long term too, as many nations with good credit will sell debt instruments in Euros.

So there is nothing bitcoin solves here, because bitcoin is a currency and currency isn't the problem in Greece. This isn't Zimbawbe where the currency was worth nothing.

The only way it could "help" is to move money out in the event of capital controls on Greek banks. But of course:

1) You have to get the money out of the bank first, which a capital control can slow down.
2) The only way it facilitates that would be being less traceable. As I said, Euros are taken everywhere, you can convert them to Dollars or anything else.
3) Most importantly that wouldn't help the situation at all, it'd make it work. Might help an individual save money, but it would only worsen the situation.

Yeah, I bought a $1000 machine to make a $2 battery cover for my phone.

In the industry, they call it the "lost wax process"...

Never mind that; Timothy has learned to not end a sentence in a preposition. Maybe he'll learn to correctly use the serial comma in lists of three or more items! Quick, set up a class so he can teach the other editors English!

You're ridiculous. "Oh, I can just walk into a major bank, an insurance company, or a credit card processor, and, with no foreknowledge of their systems, wave my hand and reconstruct their entire data center from back-ups, no planning required!" You'll get a non-working system.

You're one of those people who thinks he's a rockstar developer, a magic sysadmin with the Midas touch. I've watched hundreds of people like you destroy businesses and then walk off smiling to yourself about how you did a perfect job. I have been there, and I have done that; you are a child to me, an artifact from my past whose knowledge and experiences are a subset of mine.

You imagine a lot.

It doesn't by design. Such things are built on top the system. It's like saying that clay earth only bears 1500 pounds per square foot load: this is a fact, just as the stated facts I have given about economics. You add an argument similar to that engineers sometimes design shoddy buildings, or that builders sometimes cut corners; those are also true, and have nothing to do with how much load the earth will bear. The fact remains you can improve your structure to bear 1500 pounds per square foot load without collapsing, and it will still collapse if the earth below it only bears 1200 pounds per square inch; you must improve the earth before the structure.

A great economic leap forward would not bankrupt us; however, a massive switch to automation would cause something akin to the Industrial Revolution, which I've accounted for. The massive unemployment will go beyond the 47% of jobs which we can automate now: with those laborers displaced, the consumer base drops by a good 47%, which means you can sell all your inexpensive goods only to half as many consumers, which has nasty implications. The Information Age unbound struggling markets: businesses couldn't double capacity to manage contracts and invoices by doubling the number of workers; the mistakes went up exponentially, and the feasibility of managing all this information was non-existent until we brought in computers, hence allowing explosive economic growth and rapid creation of jobs to employ the displaced. Mechanization will replace linear labor scaling with machine work, so will simply create a large term of unemployment.

This won't bankrupt the country--far from it--but it will inconvenience many people. I provide a welfare system which doesn't increase in costs when more people are unemployed, and which is stable against all disruptions which don't destroy the economy outright, and which completely eliminates homelessness and hunger; people tell me this is immoral because those dirty poor people should just get a job. 55 million hungry in the United States of America, 600,000 homeless, and 4.8 million homed on HUD vouchers (5.4 million WOULD be homeless), and they tell me it's immoral to provide a welfare solution that costs 98% of what our current costs, but eliminates these problems.

Morality is an excuse to protect your ego from the suffering you inflict on others.

All these products and luxuries costing ever so much are reflective of when shirts used to cost 479 labor-hours (~$3500 today), and then factories and mechanization made them cost $25, and suddenly every beggar could buy himself two shirts.

How retarded are you?

I described economics in a way where you start with people spending $320/year on chairs, and wind up with them spending $320/year on chairs AND CUSHIONS. That's not zero-sum; are you fucking stupid? More shit is coming out of one side without more shit going in the other.

I don't know, but they'd be well-advised to be about it. Phones and tablets, and even laptops, are limited in so many ways. I want an interface that can take advantage of what a full-scale PC with multiple monitors offers.

My cell phone is for checking up on stuff when I'm not at my desk. I don't want or need an OS that caters to a device that's my second or third priority.

A lot of it is just the run of the mill stupid site trying to drive up traffic with controversial headlines. Worked too, Slashdot linked to them. However part of it is just the guy being a derp and thinking that because the UI wasn't completely polished off it wasn't ready to go. Had he looked in to it, he'd realize that kind of polish is nearly always the things that comes last, right before release, for a variety of reasons.

Having taken a look at the screenshots, I can't help but think of words like "garish", "cartoonish" and "Oh, dear, it looks like Rainbow Brite puked all over the screen".