It's too bad you get sick watching 3D, but you're still whining. I usually throw up when I go out on boats, but I don't whine about it. I just avoid boats. There are plenty of other things to do.

You could try writing a letter to the theatre asking to screen 2D movies at better times. It's worth a try. It's also worth talking to your GP, because it might be something you can solve (hopefully without any medication).

3D tickets are expensive because it costs a lot of money to make a 3D compatible screen and the projectors aren't cheap either (you basically need two projectors, perfectly synchronised, and the screen needs to preserve the polarisation of light bouncing off it, which is a very rare property).

Now on that point I disagree. Sure, you don't need 3D to convey a story, but by the same token you don't need colour either. Comparing 2D to 3D is like comparing black and white to colour.

If phantom menace was re-created in 3D (and if they did a good job of it) I would absolutely watch the 3D version. I've watched the flying scenes in avatar in 2D and 3D, and in 2D I almost wished for a fast forward button, while in 3D it took my breath away. Literally. I actually *felt* like I was a thousands of feet up in the air.

The same thing could be said for colour movies. Heck, we should all just go back to reading novels.

The only movie I ever watched in both 2D and 3D, was absolutely better in 3D. Sure some are shit, but give the industry a chance to learn how to make a good 3D movie.

And how many movies from "the good old days" were just as unmemorable?

Perhaps you can only remember the absolute best of the old movies, and the only ones you'd bother to show your kids are those ones.

Or maybe you just didn't watch any of the shit movies? When I was a kid, I only watched a handful of movies each year. Now I watch a few movies a week, and only a handful each year are actually any good.

Colour me sceptical, but I honestly think tv shows and movies are better today than they were in the past. Sure, most of it stinks, but every now and then I still walk out of the cinema thinking "damn that was a good movie!"

Customers tend to stick with a single domain registrar for decades, so 21,000 domains is millions of dollars in lost revenue, in just one day. If they continued to support SOPA it would have really hurt.

And that doesn't even take into account all the customers who're too lazy to switch existing domains, but will switch for future ones.

You can bet godaddy will think twice before supporting anything like SOPA ever again.

So your parents never moved? My parents have moved house at least ten times since I was born.

4% for me.

Or just use wolfram alpha, for example:

1. enter "(distance from cairns to lismore / circumference of earth) * 100"
2. success!

What?

Bitcoin is still in it's infancy. Come back in ten years, and then we can discuss whether or not it "failed" as a currency.

Bullshit. Apple fanbois say "I have never been hacked. And I've never met any mac user who has".

No doubt there are one or two idiots who really do think macs are perfectly secure, but there are idiots among any group. Mostly it's just windows fanbois putting words in our mouths.

Were does Apple say that? When has Apple ever said macs are "virus-resistant"? Every month or two they're releasing security updates to patch critical flaws, they know full well that it isn't a perfectly secure operating system.

The only security marketing I've ever seen from Apple, is that Mac OS is more secure than Windows, and iOS is more secure than Android. Both of which are absolutely true. If anything, Apple is focusing too much on security, especially in the last few years (eg: you cannot run unsigned code on iOS, and only the built in safari browser can use JIT compilation, not any other app in the system).

But "more secure" doesn't mean "perfectly secure".

If there is a secret breakthrough in prime factorization, we have bigger problems than bitcoin. One problem would be criminals accessing your conventional bank's website and stealing all of your money.

It's highly unlikely.

The stability problem is because so few people are using it. If bitcoin had as many people using it as, say, the Euro dollar, it would be more stable than any other currency. One day it might become very stable indeed, it's certainly designed with that goal in mind.

Bitcoin is not designed to be anonymous. It's has security features which involve *everyone* who uses bitcoin helping out to verify the validity of *every* transaction in the world. Do you want your next door neighbour to know how much you get paid each week? No? That's why bitcoin has strong privacy.

Bitcoin needs privacy as a side effect of the way it works, not because it's designed to be anonymous.

Plenty of people around the world think it was a very bad idea to move away from a gold standard.

With the wallet anyone holding a baseball bat can make "an offer I couldn't refuse".

With the bank, I'm forced to trust their (in many ways lax) security policies.

With bitcoin, I can protect it with strong security techniques. Stronger than any bank I've ever dealt with.

I'm not convinced any companies, even patent trolls, are truly acting irresponsibly. It's impossible to know if a patent is/isn't valid without going to court. And it's impossible to know if a patent is/isn't being infringed without going to court.

This leads to disagreements between patent holders and potential licensors about just how much should be paid in any licensing agreement, or whether any licensing fees should even be paid at all. To make matters worse, the courts are making stupid decisions all the time.

In my mind, this is a clear situation where we need to blame whoever wrote patent law in the first place for failing to predict the mess they created. And blame more recent government(s) for failing to do anything about it.

But how to solve it? That's the trillion dollar question.

Which is something the patent system is specifically designed to encourage. The idea is to encourage entities just like Apple to spend billions of dollars researching some new technology, in full confidence they will be able to recover those billions of dollars in future by having a high profit margin on their product.

If someone else has the right to bring the same technology to the market with razor slim profit margins, then nobody will spend billions of dollars researching new technology.

Say what you want about Apple, they *do* spend billions researching new technology. And they should be allowed to recover that money.

Personally I'm not convinced the patent system is a net positive. But calling it an "evil monopoly" is a bit much I think.

I don't know anything about IBM, but Google seems to run around with their head in the sand until someone slaps them in the face with a patent lawsuit. They were told by their lawyers not to create Dalvik without a licensing agreement with Sun, but they ignored the advice. And now their getting their ass handed to them in court, because Sun/Oracle wants compensation for their inventions, and Google isn't making enough money off Dalvik to pay any reasonable sum.

Motorbike, tools, clothes, computer, bedding, kitchenware, a computer desk, two nice chairs, and a couple boxes of random gadgets, books/etc.

That's all I own. I think I can fit all that in a 3.6x3.6x3.6 cube.

The office desk/chairs are my only furniture. All the places I've lived in included furniture, and since it only costs about $10/week I don't plan to take out any personal loans to buy my own stuff (at least not in the foreseeable future).

With a stock firefox that's true.

But throw in a few popular third party extensions, and leave FireFox running for a day or two. It will start consuming all your available RAM and a good chunk of virtual memory too (growing more and more the longer you leave it open).

With other browsers, memory consumption is rarely even noticeable. I can leave safari running for *months* and it'll happily sit on around 200MB with my usual 15 or so tabs. And yes, I do have a bunch of third party extensions installed. Pretty much the same ones I had when I was using FireFox every day.