Because essentially all of that virtual money sitting in the banking system (unless you're exceedingly rich) has been very well insurred against losses, and has decades of technology and policies to help reduce 'people losing their entire life savings' or 'banks losing all their depositor's cash and now they're going belly up'. Bitcoin has literally no protections for prevention of all your value.

So if you lose your crypto key (dropped $1mil on the ground on the way to grandma's house - one reason BitCoin can't be equated to real cash) or if your bit coin repository gets robbed (akin to bank robbery but without the gov insurance), or the owners steal all your money (gov insured for certain levels), or the bank simply goes bust due to insolvancy (gov insured for certain levels) you have completely different levels of assurance that your wealth is 'safe'. If you deposit $1mil into the bank of fly-by-night, you only have so much protection for the ' being stupid with money' lever, but for people of more modest means where their money is essential to their livelihood, protections are in place to support them.

As much as you can pay your taxes in pesos, yes!

Money talks and no matter how much you huff and puff about useless semantics, the world will move on and accept e-sports into the cultural fabric like so many new forms of expression and entertainment before them.

DOTA in one form or another has been around since Warcraft III. League of Legends is close enough to DOTA that most pro's can swap between the two if they ever chose to. Strarcraft and its predecessors have been around since Starcraft 1, and most knowledge carries over. These people are used to rule changes, as generally every new game patch has the potential to introduce radically different play styles to succeed. Counterstrike and games like it haven't evolved significantly in style since the beginning of FPS's, so no worries there.

So absolutely, games change, but typically the games that are picked up for long term, high reward e-sports competitions are ones that have longevity.

I got really into watching DOTA 2. I first started watching games to learn how to play it better. The game has a pretty big learning curve, so being able to watch how people played helped me learn the basics. Once that was over, I found that there are actually a lot of interesting casters who do daily live plays which are *shocked* actually entertaining in themselves. I don't necessarily spend every moment glued to the screen like I would during major tourney's, but a nice semi-background activity to spend time on.

Well, if you've used it every job you've ever worked at, then clearly every liberal arts major should be mandated to learn it too. And by that vein, all CS grads will be required to take Latin Studies and Advanced Musical Therapy because, who the hell knows, some day you may need to learn these things.

Save a tree and use e-paper, man... =)

Clearly your ability to rationalize and look at the big picture had nothing to do with the roughly 6 years between when you hacked code and when you re-entered the market as an experienced software engineer. Don't get me wrong, eduction is great to help become a 'better person' (though I wouldn't judge them more capable than one without based on many job categories), but to assume your radical transformation had nothing to do with simply growing up is a little disengenous.

I know that when I left school, I was the biggeest hot shot coder on earth and everyone else was wrong. Flash forward 10-15 years and now I know I'm a piece of the team, and if I can't function well in the team, we all fail, etc. and so forth.

Wisdom, eduction, and experience (in life and career) change your outlook on how you do your job and live your life. Cookie-cuttering it into one category would be an oversight, and highly simplifies one's personal development.

Most applications from Google can be specifically configured to not run over mobile. Just don't watch videos or download countless imaginees and you'll be fine. The first month is ALWAYS the heaviest month you'll use mobile data on any given phone, at least from my experience (because you want to try everything, and still working out how best to integrate the phone into your life, etc..).

"We're whining that all products sold near us are designed to do something that we find undesirable."

Whining about a lack of choice is perfectly reasonable, and in the perfect world, a large enough population of people should be able to solve the issue with market forces and unrestricted market entry.

Dumb phones still exist, so the choice is yours for not settling for them, or the many other competing phone platforms in the market. We as a society have chosen walled gardens and interconnected services, many because they wanted it that way, many because the heavy marketing convinced us to do it despite reservations. Don't blame people for buying what they wanted.

I've got a Nexus 5 and the amount of data wasted on systems updates is pretty small, and that's with syncing my entire google catelog of services. How can someone sue for a service that can be TURNED OFF, hence saving your entire reason for sueing.

The shitty thing about this suit is that Google actually makes very good use of elecricity and has spent years getting it to the point where battery usage for regular background activities like described are well performing. Its an insult to all good nerds to be insulted by a bunch of ignorant people looking for their handount.

"boots it off the network"

How exactly is that accomplished? I'd assume that anyone inside a network has basically unfettered access to the device, but how would a 'drive by' attacker be able to accomplish this?

If the police enter your house on spousal abuse and see a pound of coke on your coffee table, you're still going to arrested for both. If you wanted to be a smart criminal, learn to segregate your data better, stupid.

Well hey, people have their own opinions no matter how much those opinions may contradict your singular world view.

Dubai a city with a significantly challenging future and it has little to do with a dome. It's the center of little, its propelled by wildy deep pockets vs. social need, and wealth centers in the middle east are already distributing their investments to other regions. Forget the fact that once the oil's gone the wealth remaining in the region will leach away as there's so few people (though it'll take a very long time). UAE: 9mil, Yeman: 23mil, Oman: 4mil, Saudi Arabia: 30 mil. They have huge gulfs of weath distribution, and generally horrible climates. Why would people go to Dubai if it wasn't a spectacle or a huge weath gaining opportunity? My advice: Bilk Dubai for all its worth now, because in 50 years it'll be a distant memory of largesse gone awry by modern standards.