Uh, you do realise all those things you mention about cash having a paper trail has nothing inherently to do with the cash and everything to do with the regulations surrounding the financial system - they would all equally apply to bitcoins the moment the government says so. If your employer pays you in bitcoins, that would appear on your payslips, and your bitcoin exchange transactions would be subject to scrutiny just as bank account transactions are...

If you choose a cloud offering which does that for you then yes, you don't have to worry about things like software updates and patching.

However, if you choose a cloud offering which is essentially a hosted server, then you still have to worry about all the things you would with your own local server, excluding power and hardware faults.

Amazon AWS is a platform provider, its not a fully managed solution and never has been - people have been caught out by that before when availability zones failed and suddenly people realised the benefit of having redundant instances in multiple availability zones.

You have cited a lot of things to hate over, which you obviously do, but you have yet to cite anything that can actually be sued for.

Ahh, that bullshit.

What's incorrect about the term "piracy"? Its been used to refer to copyright infringement for hundreds of years.

Once the basics of supersonic flight were understood and the materials science behind the engine tech was perfected, it was easy to produce an aircraft that went Mach 2, so the F-104 isn't something to really be compared to the F-35.

I'm not sure what the point of your post is other than a typical bitching about Microsofts past.

Go on, show us those rules which agree with you.

Airlines can't leave a minor unattended on a flight through upgrades or moving the seating allocations around, but there's nothing requiring them to allow minors with different ticketing groups to their parents to board with the highest ticketing group on flights with non-allocated seating. Boarding priority is all down to the airline, so in this case the airline was correct - the bloke could board with the lower ticketing group because that would be his choice, but he couldn't bump the lower ticketing group members up to his group.

So in other words, the airline already allows for the minors to be attended by their parents, its the parents choice as to whether they accept it or not.

In the past Microsoft may have had an NIH approach, but over the past few years they have significantly changed from that in the developer area - switching from the Microsoft Ajax tools to jQuery, using Json.Net etc etc etc.

Taiwan had various degrees of local democratic reform culminating in the first presidential election in 1996, but it wasnt until 2000 that the Kuomintang party actually lost power in an election.

It depends what they are vetting - the security of a third party service is probably something they care little about.

Every country has make-work projects, some of them even have additional benefits - the EU is currently reviewing a energy savings plan where one of the main points is "costs will be offset by the jobs created to implement this directive". Make-work.

In reality, the Chinese project is definitely not make-work if they plan to do actual research. The "ghost cities" you talk about are actually gradually filling up as more population moves from rural settings into the cities - this has been a long term goal of the Chinese government, but their "long terms" are a fair longer than the "around next election time" terms that westerners tend to think in.

If you want to see some real "ghost cities" there are plenty in Spain, entire towns and cities, with airports, which were built to sustain the Spanish building industry during the 2008-2013 period, and the properties have never been put on the market.

Welcome to the party, except you are many years behind the 'crowd' - a lot of people (but fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things) abandoned Firefox over the "Awesome Bar" debacle, where you couldn't even go back to the old functionality at all (yeah yeah, loads of people posted "fixes" which did nothing more than change the skin, while doing nothing to revert the underlying behaviour), so the current situation is nothing new.

The way the Awesome Bar was dumped on us pushed Firefox way down on my list of browsers to use, and even today I only fire it up to check website functionality when I'm developing.

Transmission over anything further than a few dozen metres.