...and are willing to accept a thicker phone to get them?

This phone is basically a third of an inch thick. Given that one holds the phone while it's in use by that thin edge, this is getting a little ridiculous. Give me a thicker phone with a much bigger battery. My pockets can handle it, I assure you, and with more edge to hold on to I'm much les likely to drop the damn thing by accident, and they could even build the phone more durably to the point I might not need to buy a third-party case either.

And will I be able to buy that vehicle for $40,000, put almost 200,000 miles on it, carry five occupants, and still drive on the highway at 75 miles per hour?

I have a lot of fun driving my car. When I'm having fun driving I'm paying very, very close attention to the road. When I'm driving as an automaton, usually on a commute, that's when I notice my attention wandering.

I would love a car to be able to go on automatic to take me to work in the mornings, and possibly to take me home in the afternoons. If I'm driving for the sake of seeing what's out there I probably want to do it myself as I don't have a route in mind doing that.

I'm a little confused. I've been to Boston, San Francisco, London, and Paris within the last decade, and those cities are loaded with private cars that are not for commercial purposes. Those four cities do enjoy relatively popular mass-transit options too, but there are loads of cars running around on their streets. I don't see private ownership of cars in those areas shrinking.

I don't think that the autonomous vehicle would be willing to take the changes offroad that a practiced offroad enthusiast is willing to take and has a degree of experience with the ramifications thereof. Heavy offroading requires understanding how the vehicle will react when used other than for its original on-road intent. It means knowing how it'll work in extremely low traction, when wheel(s) are lifted off of the ground, when the ground conditions are constantly changing, and how speed versus braking will affect all of these things. Autonomous vehicles will probably be limited to hard surface paved roads and to low speed driving in parking lots and flat unimproved ground.

It does seem like the less the topic really affects them, the stronger they feel about it and the more noise they make on it...

I enjoyed the film version. I tend to compare a lot of superhero/comic-book movies to the 1989 version of Batman, and I found the villain and the setting both more plausible in Daredevil, and while there are fantastic elements to the hero, they were certainly no more out-of-line than other comic-book movies.

If I remember right, the movie came out in that period when the Affleck/Lopez relationship was in the news a lot, so I suspect that some negative thoughts were reactionary to all of the crap on TV and in the tabloids at the time.

There is a difference though, in the form of ubiquity. There have been attempts to use scrip through the years; there are cases where towns and cities will issue scrip when one uses parking meters that can be redeemed in lieu of dollars at participating vendors, and times where the US government has used scrip in warzones to reduce the proliferation of funding for nefarious purposes, and even sometimes businesses in a common area will attempt to use scrip to encourage return visits because that scrip is only redeemable in that area, but in the end, it's not widely enough accepted to last. Even when Wildcat Banks whose intent was to be universally accepted issued their own notes before the establishment of a central banking authority in the United States there were lots of problems; banks could go under and their notes would become worthless in the holders' hands.

We've watched Bitcoin jump all over the damn place. We've seen numerous scandals involving theft of what's considered to be a lot of money, using the very structure of the system as the means to orchestrate the theft. Bitcoin is not mature enough to be used as a true replacement currency.

At one point, Spanish "pieces of eight" was the de-facto world currency, even though they were not really controlled by the Spanish at all. You still saw wholesale slaughter if not outright genocide when that was the standard.

Fact of the matter is, if a group wants something that another group has badly enough, they'll engage in violence to get it. The particular medium of exchange won't make a damn bit of difference.

Gold is used in a lot of different ways.

http://geology.com/minerals/go...

Some are artistic. A lot of gold goes into finished products though.

That is completely self-referential.

Back when I had a Palm Pilot I found that the Graffiti entry method was very effective, much more than trying to press tiny on-screen 'keys' with a fingertip almost ten times bigger.

Instead of a stylus, how about we make the area of the on-screen keyboard instead act as a finger-pad when the phone is held in-portrait? I think it'd be big enough to reproduce Graffiti strokes with one's finger so that a stylus wouldn't be necessary...

I see Bitcoin having a twofold problem. First, a Bitcoin in of itself has no real-world value. Certainly it costs money and/or resources to create, but once created it has no worth of its own, its only worth is that of exchange. Second, it doesn't have any strong central backer with an authority to reinforce it like national currencies do.

All other currencies have at least one of these characteristics satisfied. Fiat currency is supported by a government. Not-government-supported currency like gold has value besides its means as an exchange rate. Bitcoin has neither. Right now it has some vigorous supporters, but those are truly very, very few in number, and my guess is that large entities that have chosen to accept Bitcoin do so for the purposes of engaging that community, and are well aware that there's risk that Bitcoin could come completely crashing down and the fees they've collected in Bitcoin could be completely worthless at any time.

Bitcoin is a nice experiment, but given all of the highly publicized thefts with the only prosecution seeming to be for government officials that got caught using their offices to get access to do the stealing, I don't think that Bitcoin as it is now will be the future. It might help direct us to where to go, but it is not the end result.

It's actually the number of people arrested for committing crimes.

The troubling thing in cases like this is that even if the individual arrested wanted to commit a crime of this nature, he probably would not have been able to do so without help, and the only help he found was from the FBI. We don't know what he would have done had he not found that help. Would he have continued to fantasize and plan until he died of old age or until he eventually found that help, or would his mind eventually have changed and other, more pressing needs steered him away from this course?

I don't doubt that just about everyone, at some point in their lives, feels enough anger or depression to want to hurt a whole lot of people. Most of us, even those of us with a truly legitimate reason to be that angry, get over the feelings of wanting retribution. Has the FBI managed to uncover a 'plot' like this where there were more than two people involved that weren't FBI agents in it? So far in every case of this that I've read about, there was one or two people only, and the FBI provided just about everything and was involved in the 'planning'. We need to ask ourselves, are we catching criminals, or are we creating criminals of people that wouldn't have actually offended had they not been given access to materials and encouragement? I'm starting to lean towards the latter, and it may be time to consider laws that prohibit law enforcement from providing explosive materials or weapons, both fake and real, as 'support' to an individual or individuals that have not been able to acquire them on their own through other sources. It's one thing for the mole to give the would-be terrorist a fake detonator to use on the real explosives that the individual acquired, but it's another matter entirely to give them what they think is a thousand pound bomb as the entire basis for the criminal complaint when they probably couldn't have acquired it themselves anyway.

This is a guess, but I suspect that people with just a *little* bit of extra fat content are better able to survive illness where they cannot eat or where they suffer from diarrhea or other digestive tract inflammation. I've also read somewhere that there's a theory that nerve cells and fat cells are relatively closely related, so perhaps when the lean individual gets ill, the body inadvertently starts trying to extract the energy from nerve cells in a fashion similar to what it does from fat, which effectively attacks the nervous system.

Obviously too much fat is very unhealthy, stressing the organs and the joints, but the definition of what's healthy has changed so many times over the last several decades that I don't know what to shoot for.

I think that you meant to say Terry Pratchett instead of Douglas Adams. That doesn't really impact your point though, and given that Pratchett was a relatively wealthy man who enjoyed help continuing his work he probably had a better quality of life in part because those around him already understood what he wanted or needed to communicate through that work, and as you said, he had a different form of Alzheimer's as well.