No, Bitcoin became popular because a bunch of crackpots bought into a bunch of anti-government bullshit. Despite all the problems and imperfections with governments and regulations, the bitcoin nutjobs are too busy drinking the anti-government kool-aid to understand that it's precisely those governments and regulations that create stability which in turn makes a currency actually worth something.

And a few speculators looking to get rich quick.

Why do people open an account with a stock broker? You're saying to someone "I want to buy (or sell) X, go find me someone who has X to sell (or who wants to buy it)". The whole point of an exchange, whether it's stocks or Bitcoins, is to do the work of finding buyers and sellers so you don't have to.

And it works reasonably well if the exchanges are honest (or forced to be honest by regulations). Bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in any way so they attract people who are specifically looking to rip you off. Just look at the past year. Nobody has lost any significant money from actual trading on Bitcoin exchanges. All the loses have been from exchanges taking people's money and then disappearing.

Not really.

Yes, if you buy Bitcoins and then the price goes down you lose money, just like with stocks and futures. However, most of loses with Bitcoin has not been from normal trading activity. Almost all of the losses have been from the Bitcoin exchanges stealing people's money. That's very rare with stocks and futures due to regulation specifically designed to prevent that sort of thing. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's rare.

For the past couple of years the Mozilla developers have been hard at work removing features from Firefox and making it less and less useful. We've been able to (mostly) work around these stupid, pointless changes with the use of additional extensions. Having to add extensions to bring back features that have been removed is stupid, but it works.

Now, with the new "Australis" design they take things to a whole new level. Australis completely destroys almost everything that made Firefox popular in the first place. An enormous amount of flexibility and customizability has been removed. But not just removed. Completely ripped out in such a way that getting it back through extensions (which are just bits of Javascript and CSS) will be difficult, if not impossible. Extensions such as "Classic Theme Restorer" attempt to undo some of the damage, but are only able to do so in a very limited way.

Firefox, as we know it, will soon be gone. What a bunch of assholes.

Ultimately, encryption is meaningless. If the NSA (or any other governmental agency) wants something, they will get it.

Even if you invent some suoer-duoer-impossible-to-crack encryption, they will simply go to a secret court (that is accountable to no one) and get a secret order, that you must comply with and that you aren't allowed to talk about under penalty of going to prison, on the grounds of NATIONAL SECURITY.

Until *THAT* problem is addressed, encryption is meaningless.

Just wait till Firefox 29, aka Australisaurus (assuming they stick to their release schedule).

If you haven't had the displeasure yet, check out one of the recent beta builds. It is a marvel of stupidity and in one fell swoop Mozilla has managed to destroy almost everything that made Firefox popular in the first place.

Windows 8.1 with the newly leaked "Update 1" un-does many of the mistakes Microsoft made with Windows 8. After a bit of tweaking and wrangling, I was able to get a system that was actually usable and very similar to Windows 7, other than:

(a) An ugly, shitty color scheme
(b) A "Start Screen" that is cluttered and less useful that the old "Start Menu" and
(c) Windows Explorer (now called "File Explorer") uses the Godawful "ribbon" which makes things more cluttered, confusing and overall less useful.

Windows 8 still sucks and is pointless, but with the addition of the new Update 1 it's a lot closed to what Windows 8 should have been in the first place.

It's a signal that nobody uses OneNote because nobody knows what the fuck it is.

The whole "We changed our mind and decided that Pluto isn't a planet" is bullshit. Just say that Pluto and Eris are both planets and be done with it.

All told, up to five "malware.binary" alarms reportedly sounded, each graded at the top of FireEye's criticality scale, and which were seen by Target's information security teams first in Bangalore, and then Minneapolis.

Well, there you go.

As much as people (including me) like to hate on banks, when was the last time you actually lost money? When was the last time you put money in a bank and they "lost" all or part of it? When was the last time you put money in a bank and lost all or part of it because the bank was robbed?

That's $1200 a year. For the same $1200 you can buy a NAS box of equal or greater capacity that's yours and doesn't require monthly payments.

There are several problems with the whole "cloud" thing:

- I can buy a few terabytes of local storage for the same or less than paying Google
- Google constantly changes things (features, terms of service, etc) and if you don't like it, tough shit
- Encrypted or not, you have no control over your own data, they do
- ISPs severely throttle upload speeds. Getting a few terabytes into the cloud will take a really long time

So stop pretending that phones and tablets are real computers and stop trying to use them that way.