This, more than anything. Bitcoin hasn't penetrated into mainstream financial markets at all, so if/when it implodes it won't affect the market at large. What worries me is that Bitcoin Futures has the power to change that, it offers an in for investment bankers and hedge fund managers to start speculating in bitcoin, which given their penchant for greed and the current wild west regulatory situation in cryptocurrencies, could create a recipe for disaster.

You have to use an exchange like Coinbank or Bitfinex, they'll take your bitcoins and offer you whatever other currency. Thing is that these exchanges often have restrictions on when, how often, and how much you can exchange, often they have queues that you have to wait in to actually exchange your currency. If you're a new user, you can usually expect to wait a while to drop your bitcoin for some other currency, and you can usually expect to have a limit on the amount you're allowed to convert. The exchanges do this to help prevent a crash via a flash selloff, and to some extent it's successful, however eventually consumer faith in the future of the value on Bitcoin is going to drop off (I mean really, $17k?) and when that happens those same protections are going to make the crash all that much worse for people involved.

Given that this advertising is usually targeted at the 80% or so of the population that barely know what an internets is, I wouldn't agree with you. I still come across plenty of people that install stupid shit like Honey or coupon printers, so SOME advertising works, you just need to target it in the right way.

Disabling the App Readiness service (disable, not just stop) is a temporary workaround, it will start up normally. It also disables updates on reboot, if that's of any use to you :)

I think there was some misunderstandings here from both of us, I thought you were panning things like the US dollar and not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is trash and a terrible store of value, but I think that has more to do with the rampant speculation than it does with the concept.

And what, exactly, gives any other physical "money" value other than whatever value we assign to it? If we have a gold backed currency it is no more or less valuable than we believe it to be, same as modern currency.

Except that's not really true, we had things like the SCR-536 (AKA Handy Talkie) in WW2 that operated on batteries and had ranges in AM up to a mile on open ground. If we had these we could probably have set something up similar to a cell network in the 40s, and the handests would only have weighed a few pounds at most. Heavy by today's standards but certainly not out of the question.

He didn't think it was perfectly acceptable to spend two billion dollars on a website that hardly ever worked, he expected a working program. It's also exceedingly disingenuous to imply that the money was all spent on the website, that money was spent to stand up the entire damn program, from the website to inter-agency connections to the assholes answering the damn phones.

But hey, you just keep throwing your bullshit around, maybe someone might buy it.

Back on topic, I would like to see some proof that a DDoS occurred before everyone gets on the "OMG THE GUBMENT WAS HAXXORED" bandwagon. Let's not forget that this is EXACTLY what happened in 2014 the last time Oliver asked everyone to go leave comments, and I don't recall anyone classifying that as a DDoS.

At $999, I can buy 4 (or more) chromebooks, which are more than adequate for pretty much all education needs. Way to read your market there, Microsoft...

Sideloading is still a thing...

Not that I'm advocating for this nonsense, but don't act like it's the end of the world. As long as I can run native x86 apps sideloaded it's not a huge deal.

As long as the implants are completely voluntary and offer to remove them when no longer wanted, I don't see a problem here.

5 years old, most schools were buying the 13" non-retina MBP, which is a 2012 vintage model.

Not having a ton of knowledge on UWP yet beyond replacing win32, does it offer any benefits from the existing platform? I mean, if they decided not to tie UWP exclusively to the Windows Store (or at the very least made sideloading easier), I could get behind a change in forma if it provided some concrete benefit, like, say. not being beholden to x86 anylonger.

Yeah I don't really see a problem with this. Carry on modders.

"Baseless apple apologizing" LOL

1. Not a fanboy, personally I've never purchased myself a mac. I've used many but I can never justify the cost.
2. Laptop weight can easily be considered a specification. If you like carrying around a 10lb brick then by all means ignore the build however don't assume everyone is as narrow minded as you.
3. That you're so incredibly focused on CPU/GPU upgrades shows how much you really know about what happens inside of your computer.
4. Yes, the Broadwell builds are a couple of years old but that's pretty normal for Apple's refresh schedule. They usually update their MacBook Pro lines about every 18 months. So they're due, and there is every indication that they will be doing so this fall, probably around October.

I suppose I should have made my first post more clear, my statement was meant to point out that TFS was flamebait, and likely the article as well. This kind of reporting in general, the kind that ignores facts and shapes the story to push an agenda, really irritates me and I do what I can to shine light on these instances when possible.