Radio isn't "free." The radio stations had to pay the record labels, songwriters and artists for the music they played. In turn, they charged businesses money for - horrors - "unskippable" ads that you had to listen to. Or in the case of public radio stations, asking you for money directly to keep them on the air.

There is no free lunch.

Or perhaps he understood more than you, and those spending spikes reflect idiot speculators trying to unload bitcoins before they fall too far? Kind of like the spike in unloading any speculated currency or commodity when it starts to crash?

Also - honest question - you keep referring to "disinflationary." That's not a term I have heard before, can you explain where this term came from and how it differs from deflation?

Fair enough point. But the rationale for the gold standard I have heard from most proponents was that paper money "isn't real" and only has value as a more convenient way of, in effect, carrying gold around since it has "real value." (I also find more than a little irony in having met a few of these folks who are also major proponents of BitCoin and manage to swallow the cognitive dissonance nicely.)

If your rationale for supporting a return to the gold standard is keeping governments honest about their spending, then I find that much more rational. It just seems from historical example to be incompatible with promoting real economic growth, or dealing with expediencies (for example, financing World War I was the reason most countries got off the gold standard in the first place).

That's not how it's supposed to work under the old "gold standard" that tinfoil hatters worldwide espouse a return to. Under the old method, you would peg your currency at "$4.75 = 1 ounce of gold" and that was expected to never change. Ever. Otherwise, what's the point if I can say a dollar is worth .00075 oz of gold today and .0008 oz. of gold tomorrow? Because that's pretty much how it works in the open exchange market today. Currency values fluctuate, the price of gold fluctuates - who cares if you can't force the government to give you gold for that dollar bill when you can always find someone to sell some gold to you in exchange for those dollars at the market price?

And the thing that caused everyone to get off the darn gold standard in the first place was not only that you could have inflation or deflation, but if you had deflation or inflation, there was nothing your country could do about it. And if you are deflating and you can't do anything to stop it, your economy is f$%&*ed.

Aside: For those wondering why economists are so scared of deflation, it's because it destroys the rationale for people to save and invest. If it costs $1 to buy a Big Mac today and will cost $1.10 next year, instead of just sitting on my leftover lunch money I should put it in a bank or invest it so that it makes money and I have enough cash for next year's Big Mac. If next year's Big Mac only costs $0.90, then why risk investing it? I will just keep it under my mattress and I have "made" money (more purchasing power) by doing so. Money in mattresses = banks have no money to lend to people who want to buy houses or start businesses = fewer jobs = vicious cycle of economic misery. This, by the way, was what clobbered the world economy during the Great Depression (along with all the banks that collapsed and ate everyone's savings account, making everyone very nervous about putting their money in the bank).

Even that doesn't really work though. In Rand Paul's Good Old Days of the Gold Standard, when the world economy was probably 1/50th(?) of today's size but the supply of gold wasn't all that much smaller, you could walk into a Federal Reserve Bank with a non-ridiculous amount of bank notes and walk out with enough US-minted gold coins that you could trade it or do something meaningful with it. If we tied the world economy back to the gold standard at its current size, it might cost you $10,000 to get a big enough slice of gold that it wouldn't just disappear if you sneezed. And if gold is only useful in gigantic transactions far above the amount of cash most people can afford, what's the point?

Uh, who is the they and the we in your statements? Are you actually planning on having firefights against the US military, and if so, is this the thing that makes you think you might be unfairly outgunned? As in, you thought things were a fair fight when you were just going up against the railguns and the stealth bombers and the carrier battle groups and whatnot, but the fact you can't get a fully automatic belt feed large caliber gun and a guided bullet means the US military has an unfair advantage against you?

And, by the way, WTF do you need a "fully automatic belt feed large caliber gun" for other than really awesome G.I. Joe cosplay or slaughtering whole deer herds in under sixty seconds?

Not really. DirecTV uses the same Ku band (12-18 GHz) and Ka band (26-40 GHz) spectrum as other satellite TV broadcasters and Internet services do. At such a high frequency, it's great for delivering lots of data/HD video but has such weak propagation that you need line of sight to the satellite + a big honkin' dish to use it. So it's more or less useless for mobile phones or anything that's not fixed in location. Unless you'd like your next phone to have a .75m dish hanging off it and stand still, pointed up at the sky while you're using it.

Your leanings? Absolutely. Your intellectual capacity? Not in the least.

While I personally think homophobia is abhorrent, I acknowledge that there are lots of people who are objectively intelligent (in the sense of having high IQ scores) who nonetheless disagree about the politics. I may think these people lack critical thinking skills, but more likely their cultural background has not prepared them to think critically about the issue. I also, for example, believe that there are extremely intelligent people on both sides who radically disagree about one simple fucking sentence - the Second Amendment to the US constitution. I think it's pretty clear (why else specifically mention a well regulated militia?), but lots of other smart people don't, so I don't say they're stupid because they disagree.

Consider, for example, that - had you asked them in their historical period - almost certainly Gandhi, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Luther King Jr., Isaac Newton or John F. Kennedy would not have supported gay rights. It's not because they weren't smart, it's because they came from a background where they just weren't prepared to consider it in the same set of assumptions and contexts as many of us do today. For example, I can call Israeli settlers on the West Bank of the Jordan stupid because I believe they are "on the wrong side of history" and are harming their nation's cause in the eyes of the world; but I acknowledge that some of them may be very intelligent and - had I been through the same things as them or brought up in the same environment - I might feel the same way.

So while it's easy to say anyone who watches a show whose protagonists disagree with your views must be stupid, I counter that it's just that type of generalization which is stupid.

Ummm... no. There is no fundamental difference in the level of intellectual engagement required between enjoying "Duck Dynasty" and "Star Wars," and many Slashdotters (including myself) are raving fanboys when it comes to the latter. Your choice of lowbrow entertainment may be because you are dumb, or it may be because you are smart but looking for an escape that has oooh shiny and doesn't require deep thought. To draw inferences on intellectual capacity based on what TV shows someone watches is just snobbish.

Similarly, "highbrow" tastes don't indicate intellect, they indicate exposure to a different set of influences and pastimes. You probably think being an opera fan indicates higher intelligence than being a death metal fan. But 150 years ago every village idiot in Germany could hum along to Wagner, and Italian beggars could likely recite the works of Verdi. It didn't make you smart back then, and it doesn't make you smart now, it just means you've been exposed to opera while someone else was being exposed to Guns N' Roses or Lady Gaga. There is a strong argument to be made that the popular classical music or classic literature that has survived to this day is of uniformly high quality, and there is probably a good argument as well that appreciating these works properly requires an incisive intellect. But for every classic literature fan I have met with a trenchant insight into the contradictions of Proust, there is another who is just up his/her own ass and wants to make sure everyone knows they bothered to make it through "Dubliners."

So long story short - beware making intellectual judgements based on people's pastimes. Sixty seconds of hearing them talk will tell you far more about their intellect than whether, when you met them, they were holding a copy of Kierkegaard or "Fifty Shades of Grey."

So after you conveniently download it from TPB, how do you go about paying the people whose music you downloaded? I hate waiting in Best Buy checkout lines, it's very inconvenient. But I don't think it justifies just walking out of the store with my CD.

Significant change does in fact happen, all the time. I'm pretty sure that if you were a woman, queer or black in the United States you would find that your playing field (while still not level) is far better than it was one or two generations ago. While there is still much to be done, at least in the US care for the environment is a world away from where it was even as late as the Reagan years. Poor Americans who didn't previously have access to health care as little as two years ago now have it. Across the planet, life expectancies in the poorer parts of the world have rocketed up in the past 50 years. And, for those of us who remember the Cold War, we all no longer live in the fearful knowledge that our deaths were never more than a 35 minute ballistic trajectory away with potentially no warning.

There are plenty of things out there that are worse, too. But that is change as well.

It's easy to see that the world isn't in the state you would like and conclude that nothing ever changes, that involvement in causes or politics is futile, and that everyone should throw their hands up in frustration and walk away from caring. But things really do change - even if it is slow - and to dismiss the ability of people to change things for the better ... or for the worse if they fail to oppose it ... is lazy at best and unworthy of our better natures.

I gather that you don't like or see much benefit from the US military. I saw a commenter a few slots above you suggesting that the thing to cut is Obamacare, which provides health care to people who are probably not the commenter. Some poster who is 65 will inevitably suggest that the rotten Education department must go, while someone else who is 18 will invariably suggest it should be Medicare. I have no doubt someone who lives in Arizona will suggest that Federal subsidies for homeowners living in hurricane zones be cut, and someone else from Florida will suggest that it's that Gestapo border protection troop that needs to be slashed.

It's funny how everyone seems to know with great certainty exactly the things that are totally worthless and should be cut from the Federal budget with no ill effects - which, purely coincidentally happen to be the things that they disagree with or they don't benefit from directly.

1. 1.) There's not a lot of "optimizing" to be done since they overlap in most areas already.
2. 2.) Sprint is a mixture of CDMA and LTE. T-Mobile is a mixture of GSM (HSPA) and a smattering of LTE. That's plenty of different technologies to support which means you might not even be able to ditch your overlapping tower leases, which is the main cost savings when consolidating carriers.
3. 3.) Why do you think Sprint and T-Mobile are significantly cheaper than AT&T and Verizon? Because they spend much less on their networks, especially once you get outside the big cities. If Google were to actually improve their networks to the point of being competitive with the "big two," they couldn't afford to offer plans at these prices.
4. 4.) The last two times somebody tried to buy T-Mobile, (AT&T in 2011 and Sprint just last year - remember that?) the FCC smacked them down on anti-trust concerns over having only three nationwide carriers. Not likely to change, especially given that Google has its own anti-trust issues from time to time...

Well, somebody needs to play Devil's Advocate here, so I will. What if onboard vehicle computers truthfully are (or soon will become) so complicated - and so integral to the functioning of the vehicle - that an untrained hobbyist screwing with it could cause injury or death? What if some homebrew-loving gearhead hacker decides to roll his own firmware for the car because he thinks he can squeeze some extra MPG out of it, and instead it zeroes out the odometer due to a glitch? Or disables the seatbelt warnings? Or randomly cuts of f the engine in the middle of the highway?

Yes, it can be argued that negligent behavior causing death or injury already has penalties, but those are after the fact. We all understand how easy it is to screw up software. Do we want to be reactive or penalize it in the first place? Might it not be reasonable to say in effect that cars with owner-modified computers are fine but are no longer street legal?

P.S. No, I don't work for a car company, I'm not a shill or a troll. In fact I generally find cars quite boring. But I find Slashdot even more boring when nobody attempts to find merit in a contrary opinion...

Absolutely none. He has no legal requirement not to publish the classified information of another country, as you pointed out. But that's not what he is in legal hot water for.

When someone can offer some proof otherwise - "zOMG Sweden must have made all this up this because the CIA has nude pictures of their bikini team and I heard this is 100% true from a dude on reddit" does not count - I will gladly listen.