The new Dell XPS 13 (2015 version) is a pretty solid contender for "best Macbook Air-like device that runs Windows 8". Either that or the new X250 Thinkpad. I own the X230 and will probably pick up the XPS 13 to replace it here soon. It has a keyboard, the base model costs the same as a MBA, and has a 1080p screen. Hard to beat. The high end model has some insane 3200x1800 touchscreen which Win8 actually scales pretty well.

The webpage linked shows precisely ONE router model. Or, am I blind?

http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/...

As long as there are investors who think this case will pay off, the case will go on.

Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.

On the contrary, there is no need to adjust the quantity of money to reflect population growth or GDP or anything else. The value of the money will adjust automatically based on supply and demand; it's impossible to have a shortage or surplus, as the units are arbitrary and have no direct use apart from serving as money. Changing the quantity of money in an attempt to regulate the price ruins an extremely useful economic signal regarding the demand for money and the balance between consumption and investment, leading to overconsumption and/or malinvestment.

Bitcoin is inflationary for now—any new currency must be, during the initial distribution phase—but over the long term the supply will be relatively constant and the price thus will be fully determined by the demand for bitcoins. Variations in the price will thus signal changes in the demand for money—to the extent bitcoins are used; the effect is diluted by the presence of other, centrally-managed currencies—which in turn informs the market about which investments are better or worse than average. Assuming a growing economy, any investment which does not outperform the expected price deflation is worse than average: investing in it would reduce the rate of growth. Under forced inflation there is more investment, but some of it is malinvestment, driven by the fact that simply holding the money causes it to lose value (artificially, due to the increased supply), and thus contributes to a lower average return and a poorer economy.

One could argue that the entire universe as we know it is nothing more than "an invention of the human mind", leaving no scope at all for discovery, but that is hardly a useful position to take in this context. Even if you did take that approach, mathematics should still be excluded, because mathematical relationships exist independently of human thought. The ratio of a circle's radius to its circumference is tau, and would remain tau even if no human ever existed to discover that fact.

Invention implies an element of creativity, deliberate choice among the available alternatives. The only choices in math are in the selection of axioms. Mathematical axioms may be invented (under significant constraints necessary to keep the results applicable to the physical universe, though there remains some flexibility), but everything beyond that follows mechanically from the axioms—and is thus discovered. Similarly, once your requirements are known, developing a software algorithm comes down to little more than solving the system of constraints described by the requirements—given the requirements specified in a formal language, this is something that could be solved in principle by a search through the solution space using tools similar to mechanical theorem-provers. Intuition helps in narrowing the search space (at the cost of possibly missing the solution entirely), but it isn't essential given sufficient time and memory. Of course, an actual program includes additional elements such as comments, identifiers and code style which are chosen by the programmer and have no effect on the program's behavior; these creative elements would be invented rather than discovered.

Science, moreover, is not "purely an invention of the human mind" any more than mathematics is. It consists of both discovery and invention. Science is essentially the process of making observations and developing statistically consistent models. There is more flexibility here than in math; models can fit the data to a greater or lesser extent, and the best-fitting model is not always the most useful. A useful approximation can thus be considered an invention; just the same, most of science consists of discovery rather than invention of new models, even more so when the goal is simply to fit a standard statistical model to the available data, pure math combined with discovered observations.

The algorithms have been known for about 30 years, but they've always existed as a solution to the problem Bitcoin was intended to solve, waiting for someone to discover them.

In that case, the correct word is "discoverer". The name Bitcoin was invented, but the fundamental algorithms with which Bitcoin solves the distributed ledger problem have always existed; it just took someone asking the right questions to discover them. You don't invent solutions to math problems, you discover them, and that goes for software algorithms just as much as any other form of math.

Scarcity is a fundamental requirement for any currency. It's either natural due to physical scarcity, as in gold, or artificial, as in bitcoin or US dollars or most other currencies in common use. Any digital currency will have the property of artificial scarcity, because information is not naturally scarce. Ensuring that scarcity is maintained without reliance on a central authority is what the blockchain is all about. The only significant difference in the form of scarcity between bitcoins and dollars is that one is governed by a fixed and unbiased mathematical formula, while the other is dictated by politics and thus unpredictable and subject to corruption.

You can complain all you like about "unfairly" enriched early adopters, but I for one would much rather have that than unfair enrichment based on one's political connections. When bitcoins come into existence they're distributed by a scrupulously fair lottery with proportional odds to people doing useful work for the network. When dollars are produced they benefit first with the authority to order them, and then those who decide how they're distributed, then finally the banks and government contractors and employees who get a chance to spend them before prices adjust to the increased supply; at each stage there is plenty of scope for self-enrichment through manipulation of the flow of new money.

Anyway, if you really want to trade traditional currencies online (as credit—the closest you're likely to get to trading the actual currencies), the reference client and server for Ripple are open source under the ISC License. Such a system can't be completely distributed, of course, since it's tied to external centralized currencies, so it's no substitute for Bitcoin; Ripple solves a different, and easier, problem by dealing in loans rather than assets, leaving it up to the users to decide how much credit to extend.

All this talk of choppers lately inspired me to rent Blue Thunder from Netflix.

I think your advice is valid in both hemispheres.

Solar still works just fine in urban spaces too, it does not scale as well there due to population densities, obviously, but urban spaces take up a tiny proportion of available land. I will give you that solar does not work for the minority use case of nighttime industrial solar, but given the tiny portion of the energy market that represents I don't see it being a major issue. As solar power continues to drop, nighttime industrial may simply vanish as solar continues to drop in price. I don't see the point of arguing this, solar will be cheaper than coal by the end of the decade even without subsidies. You will need nighttime generation capacity but long term the writing is already on the wall, business will opt for the cheaper solution.

Solar can be installed locally per house for cheaper than the cost of grid power. General rule of thumb is you need 60% of your roof covered in Solar to meet 100% of your daytime residential needs. Solar doesn't need to be centrally located in giant farms, it can be distributed in urban areas with overlap on existing structures with no problem.

Nighttime power use is a lot lower than the 3pm-7pm peak daily usage block when residential and commercial is at it's highest. People are generally watching TV on their couch and commercial properties aren't being lit/climate controlled as much. This isn't a major , unsolvable problem.