I remember when HP made really, really (!!) great stuff {sigh}
Those days are long gone.

The Woz came from there originally and almost never left because the environment for engineers was just that good but the money grubbing CEOs and B.O.D. killed all that long ago

Today HP shares only 2 letters with it's former glory and that is not nearly enough.

HP needs to just die and go away - soon.

It's interesting (and not coincidental) to note that perhaps the very best of the best of the moderators is stepping down and several of the younger newer and frankly less ... ummm ... rock solid of the moderators are remaining.

I tried MeFi some years back and grew disaffected with the environment. I was initially attracted because of the very heavy attention to keeping things on topic and keeping the crazies away but soon grew disenchanted when it became apparent that the uber-heavy moderation was not applied uniformly. Friends of the site were granted far more leniency than others and the sheer amount of what I am forced to label as misplaced political correctness from the younger staff (staff who are staying on) was outright annoying.

Google did not kill MetaFilter. Metafilter did that to themselves by allowing disparity in their moderation and substituting hipsteresque faux-concern for alleged dubious subject matter to prevail over true conversation. I have dropped in from time to time to watch the membership decline and have seen the conversation stagnate.

Buy-bye Mefi (and Boing-Boing) - you were great when you were great but now .... not so much.
The world moves on.

On the Internet nobody knows that you're unemployed.

Lennier ended up on a small farm located on an earth-like planet way on the outskirts of Grid Epsilon and lived a happy, if uneventful, life with his trusty space-collie as his most trusted friend.

You don't have to be a Michael Straczynski to know that B5 had a "beginning of the story" and an "end of the story". One of the best decisions that Mr. Straczynski ever made was to allow the story to end (and end grandly I also have to say).

Too many cheap crap-hounds (*cough*couch*abrams*cough*) try to extend a story as long as they are able to squeeze money out of it and are eventually revealed to have no idea what they were doing or where they were going with it. Straczynski told a really great story that ended i a really great way. Live and art have to move on.

A 4 TB slowish seagate hard disk can be had for about $160ish if you look around. Five of them are $750. An inexpensive bod tower such as a TowerRAID 4 Bay eSATA RAID runs about $150. Get two of them.

Total cost is around $1100 and the solution is expandable .

>. All the transactions of all the people are public and is verified by multiple entities

Oh really? So you know *all* the principle entities of Mt. Gox? You know just where they were storing/investing that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ? You know the names of the independent accounting agency that oversaw that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ?

You know none of that and very little else.

Why who ever would have thought that when you give have a f!@kig BILLION dollars to a more than less anonymous source(s) by anonymous means and with no oversight - why who every would have thought that maybe - just maybe - someone would be tempted to just walk the hell away with Half a BILLION??

You know who didn't think that way? Some chump wanna-be geeks with too much disposable income and too little common sense.

>What gives you the right to say 'Bitcoin was designed as a vehicle to steal' ?

I'm guessing that it has something to do with the fact that you are giving your hard-earned money to an unknown source to be looked over by unknown people by unknown means???

Hey but that's just me - please feel free to send me any extra money that you have and I'll be sure to protect it for you and even give you a return on your investment when the price goes up! Hey - whata deal

A studio enforcing their copyright against personal-use downloads might be a somewhat crappy and ill-advised practice, but it's not "trolling". To me if you were going to call something "copyright trolling" it would be more like using copyright letters to silence people, aka SLAPP, not using copyright the way it was intended, to prevent people other than the owner from making copies of the entire media as a substitute to buying it from the media holder.

I'm seeing far more liberals (on the internet, generally pretty wealthy) that are pro-guns, so not that hard for me to picture. But I will grant you the average conservative probably wouldn't get it.

Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency, what's so fundamentally wrong with paying more to get through faster?

If your money is worth more than your time, you'll wait, if your time is worth more than your money, you'll pay. That's a fundamental decision every time you say something like "I'll pay someone to change my oil because I don't want to spend 20 minutes and get dirty doing it myself", or "I'll eat out so I don't have to cook". Time/money/value decisions are something you make dozens of every day.

I was once at an airport, I think it was LAS... people were all piled up in a clusterfuck right after of the entrance to TSA where they check IDs, even though there was about a mile of Disneyland spiral queue that was not being used. A helpful TSA agent started to open up the spiral queue, and was actually rebuked by a superior because "that's not the way they do things", and everyone that went in the queue had to rejoin the mosh pit of people.

And then they closed two of the four open screening lanes because "it wasn't busy enough to justify having that many open". We had to literally jog across the airport to catch our flight after being stuck in that mess for 50+ minutes.

I'm not sure it would take new technology to fix the TSA, just some people running the show that don't have their head up their ass.