I don't think you can really ban BitCoins. Sure some may try, but it really doesn't make any sense. You can trade whatever you want for whatever else you want and the government can't do anything to stop you. You could trade 50 bushels of wheat for a cell phone if both parties agreed they were getting a fair deal. There are obviously some restrictions such as drugs, but those are basically illegal just to own, regardless of whether you are trying to sell them or not. Banning the trading of certain goods which aren't inherently harmful by themselves seems like a dangerous precedent to set.

Not sure about the US, but in Canada, here's how it has been since the advent of the internet

1. Dial-Up limited by hours connected
2. Dial-Up unlimited
3. Cable/DSL unlimited time, unlimited throughput
4. Cable/DSL with limited throughput
5. Currently: Cable/DSL are slowly ramping up, offering more speed and throughput as time goes on.

Really, there was a period when everybody was just switching over to broadband where they could essentially give everybody unlimited because there just wasn't that much content out there to saturate the network with. Now, with the amount of stuff delivered online, it's quite easy to go through quite a lot of bandwidth. My kids were eating up a ton of bandwidth watching YouTube videos on their iPods. I set a speed limit on those devices in my router, to about 1 mbit/s and was able to cut their usage to 1/3 of what it was. If there was no limits, people would end up using a lot more bandwidth than they currently do. I have my Netflix set to low quality most of the time because if I don't, it eats bandwidth, and I don't really care most of the time when I'm watching on my tablet. If I had unlimited internet I would probably just leave it on HD all the time, and not set any limits on my kids YouTube, and we could probably easily get to 500 GB per month of usage. Having a limit forces people to think about how they utiilize the resources they are paying for.

Even if we ignore the main use of Adblock Plus, which is blocking advertisements, and looking at the broader functionality of "users are legally allowed to control what happens on their screens and on their computers while they browse the Web", then it would be quite detrimental if users were force to render content on web pages. I personally don't use Adblock Plus, as I like to support the sites I visit, and most of the sites I frequent have only a moderate number of ads. However I do use stuff like Flashblock to stop things like autoplaying movies and animations. I also don't like running Flash by default as there are a lot of exploits. Not allowing users to run what they want, and being required by law to run whatever script the webpage sends at them is a recipe for disaster.

Not if you count the time getting through security. For me, this is one of the biggest comforts of riding a train. I use it for short city to city trips. Show up 20 minutes before scheduled departure to make sure you aren't late, walk on, walk off. Most train stations are in the middle of the city while airports tend to be on the edge of the city, which, depending on where you are going, can often add even more travel time to travelling by air. Also, sometimes minimal travel time isn't the biggest concern.

Did you also notice how the episodes aren't scripted around the commercials? This is one of the biggest problems I have with network TV. The entire show is scripted around the fact that there are going to be commercial breaks at designated times throughout the episode. You can't have a 20 minute continuous sequence because they would have to shove a commercial in there every 10 to 15 minutes. And because they want to make sure you don't want to leave, they have to spend 2 minutes leading up to the commercial building up suspense, and then they usually put about 30 to 60 seconds of filler after the commercial to make sure nobody misses anything. So, not only are the episodes shorter, they waste even more time just working around commercials. The amount of actual story you get in a "1 hour" network show could probably be compressed to 35 minutes if they didn't have to work around commercials.

HBO does have an online only subscription now from what I understand. However, it's $15 a month, which I consider to be quite expensive. At least they are starting to get the idea. If ESPN did the same, you would see huge swaths of people cancelling cable. The only problem I see in the future is that people will end up paying almost as much as they are with cable once they've signed up for all the content they want. If it's all ad free, then it's probably still a plus to the consumer, but it still doesn't mean any extra money in my pocket.

224 units is not enough to build even an elementary school around

Why not? If the housing is meant for families, let's assume a modest 60 percent of the houses have families, and that they each have 2.3 children. That's a total of 309 children. My kids go to a school of about 350 kids. I understand that in some places they have huge schools with thousands of kids, but I really don't see the advantage of that. Smaller schools where everybody knows everybody have a lot of appeal.

It's not really just about annoying the neighbours. If you stick all the poor people in the same neighbourhood, then all the poor kids will go to schools with poor kids, and all the rich kids will go to school with rich kids. Since schools are funded by property taxes, the poor kid schools always end up having less money. If you mix poor and rich kids in the same areas, and they attend the same schools, and benefit from the same property taxes, then things end up much more even. Instead of one school having everything, and another having nothing, you'd have all the schools with similar amounts of resources.

Personally, I think that Minecraft needs a lot of work. The gameplay itself is pretty good, but it really needs to be reworked in terms of performance and stability. I was hoping that things would change with MS buying it as they could hire more people to work on it, but I don't think they've actually done anything noteworthy with it yet.

Well, the kid was only 2 years old. You could presumably clone them and the kid would just be reset at birth. Sure, the kid would have a different personality because of different life experiences, but the kid should look pretty much the same. This brings up a good point. Why try to cryogenically preserve such a young child. It's not like they have any idea about what is actually going on. If you were able to revive them, they wouldn't have much of a recollection of their previous life. Most people don't remember events from when they were 2 years old.

Exactly. When Google Reader was shut down, I switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. I didn't want to just go to some other system that I didn't control and that would end up being changed or closed in a couple years. Now I have a system that works, and I don't have to worry about someone else shutting it down. As long as I can find a hosting service with Apache and PHP, it will work for me.

Why so many though? What are the politicians doing if the people have to vote on everything anyway? Isn't the whole point of electing a representative so that they can represent you. How can a voter possibly be expected to be informed on who is the best candidate for dozens of different positions in government?

If you haven't already, read An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth, but Chris Hadfield. Amazing book. It gave me a new found respect for NASA, the CSA, Roscosmos, and everybody else who helps make space exploration possible.

The biggest problem with designing an electronic voting system is how the voter and election officials are supposed to verify that it's running the correct system on election day. Let's say they did develop a perfect system that was proven to work. How do I verify that said system is even running on the computer when I walk up to it on election day? It could be any system that just shows the proper screens to verify that it is a legitimate system. The only way for me to be sure that my vote was counted correctly would be to be able to check later on some secondary system, which would remove the secret ballot feature.

Compare this to a paper ballot system, where everything is completely transparent. I can watch them seal the empty box at the start of the day, watch my ballot go into the box, and then watch all the ballots be counted at the end of the day. It's easy enough for a 10 year old to understand exactly what's happening. There is very little ability to mass game the entire system. You might be able to put a couple extra votes in a few boxes, but it would take a huge conspiracy to vastly shift the vote across multiple polling stations. With voting on computers, it could be done quite easily.

I love the Canadian paper voting method and I hope it never changes. However, there are some differences between the Canadian System and the US system. In Canada, we usually only have one thing on the ballot. Either it's a federal election and you vote for your MP. If it's a provincial election you vote for your MPP. If it's a municipal election, there maybe be three things you can vote for, like mayor, city councillor, and school board trustee. But that's about as complicated as it gets. Compare the US election ballot with a Canadian election ballot. You could see why they might want to use a computer so they can lay things out a little more clearly. Ask one question per screen and it becomes a little less daunting. However, I think that if they are going to use computers to make the voting easier, it should really just be used to enter and print out your ballot, which is then deposited into the ballot box and counted manually.

Really though, I don't think computers should be used at all. I've heard too many stories of polling locations not having enough machines and people having to wait hours in line to vote. The greatest part about the Canadian system is that It's never taken me more than 10 minutes to vote, and I've never had to travel more than 10 minutes to vote. I usually just stop by on my way home from work. I once lived in a highrise apartment that had it's own polling station. They basically have one in every school. It's so effortless. And yet we still don't have enough people voting.