Of which, the traditional slashdot response is: Show us the source of such a very outlandish statistic.

Hybrids will always be at least a fmall fraction of the economic realities of the automotive industry. Most notably:

1. Perception - Does this car add any perceived benefit to myself (smug factor)
2. Gas - Higher gas prices will influnce total cost of ownership (TCO), and for those who bother to calculate it, a rise / reduction in fuel costs should factor into demand
3. Electricity - When you pug in at home, your home electrical costs rise, so in order to maintain TCO benefits, electrical costs should rise slower than gasoline
4. Economies of scale - Producing significant portions of EV's should theoretically improve the unit cost to produce them, and ultimately allow for prices to drop improving TCO
5. Subsidies - TCO +/-
6. Resource scarcity - EV in large scales are generally a new concept for most of the world, so its taxing demand on more materials that classical auto's haven't which drives up price

If in 10 years the TCO of EV's were 1/10th of traditional gas burners, we'd be looking back and say just how quaint that ol' gas technology really was. That said, there'd be a lot more world shifting things to consider if petrolium was no longer a significant driver as an energy source.

All of what you said simply re-enfoces the fact that the general public will never accept this form of payment period. I fail to see how YOU can't see that. People are risk adverse, especially with money. They lock them up in banks with trivial amounts of interest vs. holding or investments because they're terrified of losing / investment losses. You seriously think the common man will accept this in a world of "I lost my CC, can you please issue a new one?" VS.. Oh shit, I lost my digital wallet thing, my entire life savings has been wiped out. crap.

Yes, and tea party mentality says that once you have an incumbent service in place, let them bleed the populace blind until someone builds an entire replacement network out in order to compete. Eventually the prices will rise high enough to justify having 2-3-10 competing players! I mean hell, if it costs $1000 to connect to an important service, a lot of competitors will eventually pore in millions of infrastructure to fulfill it! Plus all the trickle down economics on hardware and fibre/copper producers, etc.. its like bonanza v2. Why didn't they think of this sooner!! Its not like these fixed costs are paid by tax payers as handouts to people capable of providing said services. They didn't spend one cent to contribute to their campaigns, and nothing ever goes wrong in this magical lolly pop land.

That's all well and good assuming Ulricht was actually claiming ownership over the said bicoins, but assuming the other commentors above are correct, he never claimed ownership over them. If true, the gov after a small amount of time waiting for someone to step forward, can then liquidate property. It makes sense a lot more when they're houses, boats and cars but the same applies to BitCoins.

Now in a situation where police break up a million dollar coke bust with a mil in coke and a million in dollar bills, should the money be seized or simply held in order for guilt be offered? Its a tricky thought, because regardless of if a crime is commited or not, the object can be involved in crime outside of personal guilt. If my car's stolen and used to hit and run a pedestrian, the vehicle was involved and was a factor in the crime but I wasn't involved at all. Would a justice dept. be able to hold the car until after trial? Absolutely. Could they liquidate? Maybe, but I should at least get compensation for material losses.

Something like 90% of all apps require access to the IMEI of the phone which requires read_phone_state and that pretty much abandons all pretense of security compartmentalization since it can also see who you're calling, when you're talking, etc.. Most applications should only care and use it for a unique ID token. IF they want to fix permissions models:

1. Separate the 'phone unique number' from the phone's call state functions. Must have, end of line. This is just plain retarded form day 1
2. Write in permissions which are optional vs. required. Optional permissions are requested on demand like IOS and can be rejected or permantently accepted. Required permissions must be explicitly allowed when the application is installed
3. Re-introduce AppOps functionality or at the minimum an audit trail of when-last and how often the application attempts a specific permission operation/category
4. Consider second tier permissions model where if you want to include common and generally well understood permissions like read_gps there's no hoops to jump through, but if one wants to read and access the variety of accounts I have on my phone, I want to make damn sure that the company asking for this information has at least passed the stink test.
5. Lastly, I want third parties to be able to flag applications (based on APK signature or through store functionality) as a problem so that even if Google doesn't have the time or resources to police all applications in the sun, I should be allowed to trust a thrird party who can flag programs problems based on any reason they find.
This allows for uses like:
      - Flag applications for parental categories
      - Flag apps as 'ad-enabled'
      - Flag apps that are outright malicious in terms of stealing data/information
      - Flag apps that violate certain country laws
      - Flag apps that are banned based on administrative oversight (for work phones)
Having this barrier mandatory or optional is up for debate as well as the ability to unistall is using a 'master' control password, etc..

Well to be fair, some hosting companies have like a million sites hosted off a single IP, so not exactly irrelevant unless you know its a buggy scanner. Maybe the introduction of better summarization and breakdown tools are needed to enhance the tool, but hell anything takes time to work well for public consumption.

I've been with many people over the years, and generally hovering a little above the mean, I've met a fair number of dev's that have struggled for various reasons (I've been many of these from time to time as well):

1. The boat anchor -- They have no idea what they're doing and they waste everyone else's time by having correct their lousy work, answering questions (usually the same ones over and over and over), and just generally fristrating to teach anything new to.

2. The lifer -- Not interested in learning anything new and rarely bother unless it makes their carreer on shaky ground -- These people work at a stable though generally slack pace and learn to develop the same way and will never both to investigate new ways of doing things. They are generally a stabilizing force on the team which is often torn between jumping from one paradigm to the next and those that refuse to change anything. Training them to use new tech can be a drag on the team depending on how stubborn they are

3. The free radical -- Generally younger and more naive though not always, the free radical will always try to escape from whatever constraints you attempt ot place them into, and will fight vocally and loudly to get what they want. They will often quote material from a blog or big name in the industry without caring at all how it affects the job or workspace they actually occupy.

4. The well wisher -- Those developers that really really want to do a good job and work hard day in and day out do better themselves, but due to lack of understanding, natural talent, or whatever have a hard time grasping concepts and new areas. You want to help them so badly, and they generally do get better with training, but will never free think themselves out of a problem and will almost always need some level of supervision (and generally they like that).

5. The paycheck -- They check into work to get paid, and although amazingly brilliant or a complete dullard, will never aspire to anything because they're just there to warm the seat and to get paid. Don't get comfortable with them though because they will almost certainly be the first to jump to the next company.

I'm sure there are many more I could add to the list, but I have a meeting to jump off to. Hope this rings some truth.

Sorry, meant to say, unless there is a law.... etc.. rinse and repeast.

Any law that makes collection of terrestrial citizens information from external sources makes all this pretty much moot. Who says Canada, UK, hell Russia snoops on Americans and sells back Canadian,UK,Russian, etc.. citizen's data back with a swap? The US would turn a blind eye to it if it meant getting around pesky laws and such.

Companies always expand (sometimes to the neglect of their core products) because it feeds investor interest in the possibility that there's still profit growth in the company. If google stopped making cool things and still held like 85% of the ad market, the company's stock performance would in turn be tied pretty solidly with the ad market, which one would assume doesn't grow much above inflation, so not a great investment. So, companies expand into areas where they can convince the market that they're diversifying and growing their revenue centres, etc..

I'd say it sucks to me a minority in any group. Would the guys making lude gestures have made the jokes if you weren't there? Yup. Would the guys make the joke in the company of the company of 90% women? Nope. Is it the men you dislike, or the fact that men are being themselves (as lude and disgusting to one another as that goes)?

I fully believe that there is a tollerance line that no person should have to deal with in the work place, and if you feel that your co-workers have crossed that line (repeatedly) then I'm truely sorry for that. There are HR routes to tackle harassment, but many companies only pay lip service to supporting equality in their workforce.

Just to no single out women, there are plenty of other ethnic, religious, handicapped, etc. folks that get harassed and personally offended by people that either don't know or care if their feelings are being hurt. Its all a matter of compromize, and if one is not willing to put up being the minority (and all the uncomfortable crap that goes along with it), then you have to evaluate if its worth continuing. I assume you have the drive to stick with it since you have all these years, so good luck in not finding the alpha haters who have no interest in respecting your rights.

Gang culture is systemic, has gotten a lot of press in the past, fails to incite the populace to do anything about it, and ultimately ends up on page 5.

Its all very true, but the reverse is also true. Its not just men that aren't hooking up. There are far too many women unable or unwilling to get to know men outside of their comfort zone and will often not connect with the right guys now or ever. They will still date the same douche bag cheating assholes they always have becasuse that's all they've ever dealt with, and maybe they finally get the chance to meet a good guy and either he doesn't meet her impossibly high standards, or else she just thinks he's gay, or weak, or whatever.

Are pooly socialized men bad at dating? YES. Are poorly socialized women bad at dating? YES. Next topic.

Well yes, any C developer (already a minority in the umbrella of 'programmers' these days) can write code for the kernel, but just because one can write software for the kernel doesn't mean they can write anything meaningful to be done in kernel space vs. anywhere else. If you're expecting a slew of new driver hackers reverse engineering chipsets, and implementing better drivers, testing all corner cases (because dev's LOVE testing) I think you're barking up a very small tree, but all the luck to you, becase what's good for Linux is good for me, you, us all.