~Stephen Fry

I have never owned or attempted to own a bit coin in my life, but I don't see how playing with bitcoins is any worse than 99% of the stuff I do in my day in that regard.

You can use nearly arbitrarily small fractions of bitcoins. Denominations of all currency are completely arbitrary. We could call one billionth of a bitcoin the bitbuck and start selling and trading in bitbucks. Now we have a billion times more bit currency units to do stuff with. If Bitcoin sticks around, I highly suspect his is exactly what will happen.

Theoretically if money in your bank account "vanished" in the way the bitcoins are believed to no longer be in circulation and the government printed an equal amount for the FDIC to give you, there would be zero inflation. And generally speaking for even rather large banks the amount of funds on deposit (that are FDIC insured) is such an insignificant proportion of the amount of currency in circulation that it is not even a blip on the inflation radar.

I wonder if 40 years is just the time frame they've calculated it will take for all the stuff to trickle into the ocean.

I'm fairly certain that the healthcare industry in the US primarily takes money from the poor and concentrates it in the wealthy.

I think the difference is that when Watergate was going on there was an opposition party who benefited from making a stink about it. Therefore the reporting led to a significant call to action, which led to action. This is very different from the Snowden documents. In this case both sides are guilty and have entrenched interests so there is no call to action, therefore there will be no action beyond what little bit of a dog and pony show the administration has offered us so far.

I stopped reading your post right here.

That seems like a good enough reason as any.

That's the trouble with politics. People know what's coming, and the scientists are saying very clearly what needs to be done. However, when you're in politics, you can't usually do what needs to be done. You have to balance it with what's politically viable. When your counter-party is selling a lie of cheap energy forever, it's hard to tell the voting public that they need to make serious sacrifices in their lives or the world as we know it is going to come to an end. Especially since the changes are so slow that it makes you look like a chicken little to say anything bad might happen at all. I would argue that it's already too late and it's time to stop talking about reducing greenhouse gases and start talking about engineering the climate. There's a few plausible solutions being batted around, none of them seem all that great given that we have no idea what the repercussions will be of, for example, tossing a bunch of chemicals into the stratosphere. At this point though, anything short of global annihilation of our food chain is probably going to be considered a "win." http://www.npr.org/2013/10/20/...

I find Bing is quite adequate and sometimes better for random queries about facts for non-technical questions. As a general rule if I'm querying about something technical I will find the results faster on Google. I fully recognize that this may be learned behavior on my part.. that through experience I know exactly the key word combinations I need to feed google to get the results I'm looking for. Additionally, I find Bing Maps to be equally good for the user and much better as the developer. However, based on the other "stuff" in the Google ecosystem I can't be fussed to switch. I use Google maps on Android, therefore I use Google maps on the desktop. I use Google Docs because it's free (and cheap for my business). I buy all my music through the play store, I watch lots of youtube content, etc. Even if Bing search was better than Google search in every way, it would have to be better *enough* to get me to break outside of the Google ecosystem. It's definitely not.

It's almost never valuable to be the guy that is right when compared to being the guy that solves the problem. Being the guy that is right often just gets you marked as being the asshole. Instead, be the guy that solves the problem. And yes, sometimes solving the problem requires that you be an asshole.

Those gas stations probably have a big Chevron or Sunoco sign out front. I understand the concept of franchising but I don't think it's entirely out of line to assume the parent company assumes some responsibility for the pollution at their franchise stores.

In the states we don't use petrol. We use gas.

/ducks

If you've ever been a vendor that accepts credit cards you'll know that there's different fees for different levels of verification/security. If you collect just the card number and expiration date, for example, you'll pay a higher rate than if you collect a billing address that matches the billing address for the card. Yes it will be opt-in, in the sense you describe it, but if you aren't using chip and pin I can assure you you'll be paying higher fees and/or accepting greater liability for fraudulent charges.

I have 4 cards in my wallet. Person debit, personal credit, business debit, business credit. Now I'll need to have 4 pins in addition to the multitude of other passwords that I keep in memory. I'm sure there's plenty of people with more cards than I'm carrying.