Yeah. GPS road tax... sponsored by the NSA and your local police department that does not track you without a warrant.

I was looking forward to using rift at work, but this looks like a guy is desperately trying to type in a "deploy parachute" command into the terminal while tumbling through the air at horrible speeds.

Every time I have to sign the receipt at an Apple store with my finger, I feel Jobs mocking me from beyond the grave. "Ha! Those guys would go back to living in caves wrapped in animal skins if only I told them it was cool!"

It's not the computers - it's you getting older!

At least helicopter daddy and blackhawk mommy give a shit about the Precious. Or do you prefer the absent daddy and welfare mommy? People DO go overboard... but I feel like the pendulum is starting to swing entirely too far the other way.

I AM a physician, and yes, whoever does the demonstration takes quite a bit away from the demonstration by being pretty horrific at suturing... like 2nd year medical student who hasn't practiced bad. If they are going to compare quality of tissue approximation between sutures and their glue, they should probably use proper technique. A plastic surgeon would have laid out 10 sutures or more into the same space, probably in half the time. I am sure there's a senior surgery resident out there who wouldn't mind getting a few hundred bucks to tie a few sutures on camera.

That being said, there are some structures in the body that are very fragile, and difficult to sew. Also, the elderly and the chronically ill have tissues that just fall apart, limiting the usefulness of many surgeries in managing their illness. If we could create seams that don't rely as much on tissue strength, we could probably operate on quite a few more people.

Not only that, they also had access to all kinds of expertise that was developed using these precious federal dollars. Network communications, microprocessors, software architectures ...
How many of those talented engineers would've matured to that level if not for the cold war investments? You can certainly argue that government oversight of all this talent was misplaced, but you can't deny that it provided the essential opportunity for that talent to develop.

I've been really impressed with my Baytrail powered Windows tablet, and this might not be a bad option to turn an old monitor into an all in one PC(it looks like Windows 8 is doable as well as Linux in general) for most tasks that aren't too intensive like gaming. Though if my tablet is any indication, the dual core version with 2GB of RAM should be able to hand Civ V to an extent.

It's value keeps going up compared to the cost of the products. That's how it's defined.

"customer-mediated mining"

I don't know what "basic economics" you've been taught at the Bitcoin developer crashcourse, but as is, Bitcoin has been a highly deflationary currency, and at best, at some point in the future it will become mildly deflationary.

The whole thing is pretty much construed to protect against inflation. From an economic standpoint deflation is terrible. Most obviously it discourages investment (you're better off sitting on your money, and you're in a bind if you take out a loan since its real value will continually increase). Protecting against deflation is one of the key reasons why most countries manage their currencies.

This is not a problem intrinsic to cryptocurrency itself, and the folks who designed it must have known all that. So I think that either Bitcoin was designed with the aim of short-term profit goal of a pyramid-like scheme, or it was designed by some economic idealists who thought gold standard was too liberal in upholding the status quo of the moneyed class.

I once attended a seminar by one of the heads of emergency response from the city that's often portrayed as the world's biggest terrorism target. He was going on about communications equipment that is stored away for use after a low-yield nuke detonation. I asked the speaker whether the equipment and storage facilities are shielded against EMP. He asked me what "EMP" is.

I walked out.

There have been plenty of people who argued for banning the use of cash. In many EU countries I believe they already have a ban on cash transactions above 1000 euro.

You don't live in that kind of a society right up until the moment when you do live in that kind of a society, at which point it is rather too late to do anything to prevent it. Trust someone who lived behind the iron curtain - you don't WANT to know what society will be like if we keep heading in that direction. However small those steps are, they are not reversible.

It's not so simple. I approached the FBI with a proposal to use the military's already proven laser guidance and tracking systems to detect and rapidly respond to these threats. They apparently filed it under "kook" and never responded. The FBI is not interested in actually solving these cases. They're interested in finding someone to make an example out of and hopes that'll provide enough deterrence.

It won't.