Jed did a great deal, but Ryan Fugger is the person who founded Ripple. You're thinking of Ripple Labs(or Opencoin)

Great! Don't agree to anything. Download the source which is available on github, and run it yourself, and connect to the network yourself. No one is preventing you from doing this.

Actually Ripple predates Bitcoin by a number of years.

You could have said the same thing about personal computers. Most users who use Ripple may not even know they are using it, just like computers (most people who use computers do not realize that that thing in their hand that allows them to look at youtube is a computer)

No, it's potentially available in any neighbourhood with a ripple user to the extent that there are sufficient connections between *your* neighbourhood and *that* one.

You do not have to use Gateways to use Ripple. If someone "credits" you 100$ then you should talk to that someone on how to retrieve it. Sometimes they may be connected to gateways, sometimes they are connected to the bitcoin bridge or some other bridge and you can use an exterior system. Sometimes not.

There are no advantages whatsover to bitcoin
It's global. You can spend it anywhere in the world, assuming you can find two people who need to send/receive it. It's also not prone to being stopped by governments. If you're in Argentina and want to invest in a business in Russia, you can do that. No one can stop you. Of course, it's up to you to invest wisely - - but there are situations where it makes sense. You no longer need to use credit cards to buy things online -- no more worrying about identity fraud.

What would it matter? So long as you can't know what's going on in IE's engine, ghostery is pointless as people who pay off Microsoft can still spy on you, your browser sessions can be unencrypted whenever Microsoft chooses, etc. You might as well not use Noscript, either, what's the point of forbidding people from running software on an already compromised-to-the-hilt machine required to run IE (ie Windows)?

There's no "sorta" about it. COBOL was still being *actively developed in* as late as 2013. People are going to be supporting COBOL for generations at this rate.

On the contrary, since the Federal Reserve got started, the markets have been less not more stable, and both the US and global financial system has seen more, not less panics, of greater, not less severity.

1) I took all the feeds (>4000) out of google reader, and bookmarked them
2) Since then I've been slowly merging my bookmarks into a sqlite database, which I then pull from daily.
It's possible that feedly or some other online service might be able to help me...but after Reader shut down I've become pretty paranoid about using online services for those sorts of things; I'd rather have something that runs local(and my computer for the past year has not been capable of running pretty much anything else...ram has been at a premium). Also it's coloured my perception of Google itself: that was really the turning point between "using google services if they add value to my life/make life easier" and "PRISM-breaking my life, including a departure from any contact point with google I can live without without *too* much discomfort"
It took me 8 months to get everything to the point where it could be reached again and I've been trying to find a life balance that works ever since. I've really struggled -- google made it easy to get just the right amount of information about the world, every day. Generally if I read *all* of my RSS feeds for a day, I was bored or something else was wrong. Now there's really no boundary between "too much" and what I read daily. Consequently...sure I read ~95 feeds/day...but that's way too much time for what value it adds to my life.
So tl; dr I'm paranoid, ignorant and constantly busy now that I do a fraction of what I used to do with reader, only by hand.

Newegg takes your bitcoins, and gives you goods. That is "accepts bitcoins". Bitpay is their means of doing so. The hair-spliting over whether or not they "accept" bitcoin completely misses the point. So they use a payment processor? Many websites use paypal or credit cards for the same reason, yet you wouldn't say they don't "accept USD" because of this.

...and the legacy financial system runs on unicorns and fairy dust, I take it?