Presumably, people want Bitcoins for some reason, otherwise the price wouldn't go up. I can think of 2 reasons that could be driving it...

1. Pure speculation in a rising market and wanting to make money by investing.

2. BTC actively being used for something so they have actual value.

I've seen some minor gambling sites. And a handful of sites that accept them for services/products. There was silk road, but that's gone. With the bust, I have to imagine that people are skittish about the new silk road, so I have to believe those volumes are way down. But all that just doesn't seem to be keeping up with the extreme increase in value. Make me really think #1 is the more likely scenario.

What am I missing? How are these being used?

Side note... I've got 0.34 BTC from when I played around with it a year ago. Wasn't worth cashing in then and forgot about them. Glad I didn't lose the keys.

This almost certainly came from some sort of "how much do you spend on IT" survey. Split your normal IT spending from your Engineering hardware budget. Then compared to other industries, your IT is in line.

I think he just described pythonanywhere?

https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

It's essentially "google docs for python"

Splitting the game into 3 to tripple their profits was one of the smartest things Blizzard has done recently. They know how to make a good game, and then get you to pay a ton for it.

Google has less real world usage?

Matching a search with useful information is kind of what google does best. For voice recognition, they've been doing voice-search on Android for a long time, plus their now defunct goog-411 and that's a lot of voice recognition experience.

Siri/Majel is really just a UI layer on top of those two things.

Google may be behind in the integration, but they're probably way ahead in those two things.

Whatever happened to playdough?

It could be that the quantity of data they collect is far more than anyone suspects and that's the trade secret.

I read into these comments just to see if anybody cares.

It seems not.

If the Slashdot crowd doesn't, then why would the wider world?

Does this have implications for enhanced wireless security? A wireless signal that can only be received in a specific location seems like a valuable thing.

I never assumed malice on the phone rep's part.

I tried to explain to her that point zero zero two cents is not what was written. But she just couldn't wrap her head around it.

As of august of last year, they were still doing that. I saw it personally.

http://www.rogue-development.com/blog2/2010/08/still-time-to-teach-your-reps-math-verizon/

... if you live next to the train station on either side.

For just about everyone else, driving is quicker. For me, by about an hour.

I do take that train for work every time I have to go to NYC. But it's not because of time, I prefer riding instead of driving that far. Plus "I have a train to catch" is a great way of getting out of the remote office if stuff is running late.

Even reading that, I'm not sure that a work that doesn't contain anything from another could be considered a derivative.

Could we agree, that if WinMTR was written completely from scratch, and happened to do some similar things to MTR, that it would not be a derivative work?

If we can agree upon that, it's a hard argument to make that if WinMTR used to contain MTR work, but it has since been replaced, that it's still a derivative work.

Is copyright based on one snapshot of the work, and not on it's entire history? Could version 1.0.1 of WinMTR be a derivative, but version 1.1 not be?

Please explain "the whole 'derivative works' thing."

If I have a codebase that I'm the only contributor to, because anybody else's code has been removed -- why wouldn't that be entirely my copyright, which I'm allowed to do what I like with?

You can't copyright ideas in the US. Only specific manifestations of those ideas. So even if WinMTR is doing the same sort of thing, copyright doesn't come into play.

I'm not saying that's the case with WinMTR -- my guess is that they have MTR code in there and are not in GPL compliance.

Put this image in front of an average citizen.
http://spwebgames.com/pacman/screenshot2.png

Ask him what it is.

He'll say "Pac Man"

That's the guy that's in the jury of the trial figuring out if it's copyright infringement or not.