What a load on nonsense. That analogy doesn't account for inflation. Next year it will cost more in dollar terms to provide the same services, and that effect is compound. If inflation is about 3%, you're looking at about a 15% cut in spending in real terms over 5 years. And that's ignoring growth which will increase the burden on government services, requiring an increase the amount of resource required to provide everyone with the same services at the same levels. And then there's the aging population problem, someone has to pick up the slack on social security at some point.

Please never vote for that guy, he doesn't have a clue, or is just grandstanding.

I think that's why he's advocating using Bitcoins for exchanging existing currencies. If you look at the current rates and do a simultaneous buy and sell, you can exchange with less fees than other payment providers. Once enough people are doing that it will increase the liquidity and decrease the volitility and holding them for a longer time will be possible/sane.

I thought he signed off on them because the other guys were holding him to ransom.

That's not how it would work. Assuming he gets 50% of the original company, Facebook has taken lots of private investment since then and that share would be watered down. He would bacially get half of what Zuckerberg's shares are worth, assuming he's kept them all. It all seems pretty fishy at this stage to me though.

I really like the free version for browsing for new music but I don't see why anyone pays for the subscription service. I rarely find more than 2 or 3 new albums that are worth keeping per year and I can buy the MP3s for a couple of months worth of fees. Not to mention that when you stop paying it all goes poof.

Except the summary says it's only nine people.

They'd be much later into the Windows phone game than Android, they will still have to compete with other Windows phone manufacturers and nobody wants Windows phones anyway.

(1)+(2) I don't think Dell manufactures components but they design their own motherboards, cases, etc and assemble everything. That's a lot different from just reselling stuff. AMD sold the manufacturing part of its business a while ago, they basically just design chips now which is not that dissimilar to Dell's situation.

(3) They could save money by using their own chip designs rather than paying a third party like they do at the moment. I think the biggest gain would be in custom chips for storage/networking kit. I do agree about the investment part though. And selling x86 chips and GPUs isn't their area, especially becuase of the monopoly claims it''s bound to cause.

Overall I think there are some benefits but it's probably not a good idea.

I agree, although I'd settle for a way to collapse it down to just the slashdot logo in the corner. The grey padding at the top needs to go too. This might be ok on a modern high-res desktop machine but on my netbook I want the maximum screen space possible for content.

To be fair, they were the target of 4chan so death threats are par for the course.

On such an epic journey he'd no doubt decide to document the experience by creating a map of all the cities he'd visited. To make it more appealing, he'd probably want to colour in the cities. Of course, it would look odd if two adjacent cities had the same colour...

You can get "Adblock Plus Pop-up Addon" which will allow you to manually block specific popups.

The problem is that the banks that failed were massive and would have taken the rest of the economy with them. You basically have a choice of regulating the size of the banks and letting them fail or removing regulation and potentially having to bail them out. Either way, an unadulterated free market won't work.

Super conducting cables?

I would say put the data in the database too. It doesn't have to be relational, you can use BLOBs. It has the following benefits:

• You can use transactions on both the metadata and the data
• Backing up the database backs up everything in one go
• You can easily set up standby systems that mirror the whole database consistently
• It makes writing applications easier, anything that can talk to the database can get at the data. No messing around with mounts or file servers
• You can use a single security model. Most databases support a decent access rights system