Perhaps that's because paranoia has changed, not the allergies themselves. The 'zomg safety' soccer mom mentality has taken over. The fact that it encourages slavish, unquestioning acceptance of and obedience to authority is a 'mere' side effect.

I heard an interview with a professor on the "concerned" side and he made some interesting points about AIs. The "non-risk" side of the debate seems soley focused on the strong, human-like AI while ignoring potential risks of weak AIs that are increasingly used for things like stock trading.

Another one was that potentially dangerous AI doesn't necessarily need full autonomy to do damage. A senior banker that gets analytics/reports from trading software may be the actual actor why the danger comes from assuming the machine generated advice is the right advice. It's not hard to assume that human could be misled into performing actions that have bad outcomes because it believes the advice was right or accurate.

I wonder, too, if its possible that there could be a meta-AI. That is,an AI that isn't a single/clustered system under the control of a common piece of software, but AIs whose effect is cumulative because their knowlege inputs and actions span a common environment and allow for a feedback loop among them. Stock trading is a great exmaple because you have a common market, each AI knows something about the other AIs positions in the market and they all know about the overall status in the market.

I also wonder if our obsession with strong, HAL9000-style AI appearances will mean we won't be able to recognize many potentially dangerous emergent AIs because they don't fit the image of a strong AI.

All corporations who have the opportunity will be salivating at the chance to do this.

They're all ran by the same kind of greedy bastard, and all the signals Microsoft is sending absolutely scream "you're either going to get ads, or you're going to pay to not get ads, or you're going to pay for what you used to have for free, or we're going to force you to use our online services ... where you're going to get ads, or pay not to get ads, and we'll sift through all your stuff".

Every damned corporation wants to monetize your experience and your data, have access to all of your stuff, and claim ownership to do anything they want to with it.

Microsoft has thus far failed to come up with a compelling way to do this because they keep putting out flops which don't catch on.

With Windows 10, between now expecting money for Solitaire without ads, or sharing your wifi password with people (including whatever government demands it), and pretty much everything else they're doing, Microsoft is trying to set the stage where they have access to all of your data, have everything in their cloud, and an EULA which says they can do anything they choose.

Everything about Windows 10 is screaming this will be terrible for the consumer. And it also tells me I want no part of it.

Microsoft is basically saying they will do anything with your computer, any time they want to, and you don't get a vote. Which means I expect Microsoft to be fucking up a lot of computers and leaving that to be someone else's problem.

Then your experience is as relevant as Vista/7. As far as 10 goes the list of issues mentioned by the summary are addressed by the built-in installer options, much if not all of them.

Plus I said insert the built-in options at the top of the list, I didn't say discard the rest of the list. Dink around with host files and registry entries to your delight. But don't suggest others need to go there when installer options, and not entering an MS account as you note, will most likely address their concerns.

Or, more likely, so they can fucking monetize your usage like the greedy self entitled assholes they are.

And I don't just mean Microsoft.

Insert at the top of your list, renumber if desired:
0. When the installer gives you the opportunity to customize your setting do so, disable whatever you care too.

Not necessarily. There is also a thing called "reputation". If bitcoin is too error prone for the average user, wallet lost, passphrase forgotten, malware stole wallet and passphrase, etc ... then bitcoin gets a bad reputation and the public at large decides not to use it. Then it largely becomes an instrument of speculation as it mostly is today, its price largely determined by the expectation of speculators. Note that today they are generally betting on much wider public adoption. If evidence arises strongly contradicting such adoption the recent $1,000 to $200 price drop of bitcoin will look minor.

Is short, don't forget the warning that accompanies all supply and demand graphs in econ 101: all other things being equal. With bitcoin today there are many other factors beyond supply and demand that are highly volatile.

Well to be fair a wallet is a file that can be duplicated, backed up, like any other file; or photocopied if a paper wallet. It doesn't hold coins, it only holds encryption keys that grant access to coins.

And one does not have to rely on an exchange, its this reliance on an exchange that can introduce a major vulnerability. Now your coins are in someone else's wallet, a wallet you cannot backup. If you keep your coins in a wallet you create and backup you may be much safer. Assuming of course you have a secure computer, basically a computer that has been used for nothing other than bitcoins. Use your wallet on your regular malware infested computer and now we have another major vulnerability. Similar story for a wallet on your phone.

Fortunately you can have as many wallets as you like. Wallets on your regular computer and phone with only a small amount of coins, walking around money for a few days. Another wallet on a secure computer with a larger number of coins to occasionally refill the walking around wallets, or make occasional "big" purchases. And an offline wallet (paper) where most coins are stored, more like a savings account.

The simple truth **today** is that bitcoin is not a "currency". It fails the "store of value" test, its too prone to user error for mass adoption. What it is is a good transaction mechanism, a way to quickly transfer/exchange fiat currency. Convert fiat to coin, immediately transfer coin, immediately convert coin to fiat. No holding of coins, just conversion to/from fiat as needed. Many merchants the bitcoin community touts basically do this. They contract with an exchange that offers merchant services. The merchant does all accounting and pricing in fiat, never touches a coin. When a customer wants to pay with coin the exchange silently steps in and presents a coin price and a payment account. The merchant is credited with the fiat amount immediately upon coin receipt verification, its credited fiat paid out daily.

Today **holders** of non-trivial amounts of bitcoins are largely speculators and a few enthusiasts.

Bitcoins are anonymous until the other party in the transaction (transfer) identifies you. One only needs the cooperation of the "seller" who accepted your coins to identify you, or the cooperation of the "buyer" who gave you coins, etc. For example you buy something with bitcoins and it gets delivered to you.

It sounds, though, like it requires the client to use an upstream proxy to make it work, otherwise the endpoints would need to be enabled for this, too.

Even in the SMB world, it's becoming common for clients to want multiple ISP connections. Usually this gets implemented within the firewall or with a link balancer device that allows for various failover or balancing schemes. Any one client TCP session stays on one link, though, so two 10Mbps links never delivers 20 Mbps to any one TCP session.

I'm not sure this would be that much of a benefit on a phone, since most are single-app focused and most apps rely on a single stream, which is I guess why they use multipath TCP.

Honestly ... do you really thing do not track means a damned thing? Are you that naive?

Do not track says "gee Mr Website, will you be nice and not attempt to monetize my traffic". It doesn't mean a damned thing.

You should pretty much assume that everyone on the internet will track everything about you they can at every chance they can get. You should assume some greedy asshole with an MBA and a tendency to be a sociopath doesn't give a fuck about your desire not to be tracked is making the decision to obey no not track.

Do not track was an industry attempt to distract people from regulations which would have tried to stop them.

Do not track is a complete fucking lie.

Don't be all surprised now to find out it doesn't actually do anything or hold any weight. Which is why you should be actively blocking as many of these things as you can, instead of relying on the kindness of some greedy sociopath asshole who doesn't give a crap that your browser has pathetically announced it doesn't wish to be tracked.

Hell, do not track, when ignored like we know it is, just gives them another point of data. I don't even set it, because I know damned well it's not going to do anything.

When a company publicly says they won't respect do not track, you can pretty much assume every other company is already ignoring it anyway. There is not do not track.

Everything about you they can get, all day long, as long as the app is running.

They'll figure out what they can make money off later. Like, do people buy more gas in the winter or summer.

This is just greedy assholes maximizing both greedy and asshole. And this why I look at apps as basically ads and analytics in disguise, and why I don't feel compelled to have a smart phone with a data plan.

You can always not play the damned game.

Me, I want Android to return the ability to selectively turn off stuff that apps can do. If your app keels over because I won't let it access my contacts, I don't want your fucking app.

I view most apps as about the same as if a retail store demanded the ability to rifle through my wallet before I came in the store, only in the case of apps it's pretty much all the time.

No thanks.

Do they erode fairly quickly, requiring continuous replenishment of their fill or can they build them with good long-term stability?

Wasn't the ability for other browsers to set themselves as the default browser part of the DoJ settlement? So now Microsoft is deciding that doesn't apply?

Sorry, but Microsoft has gone well into the "we can do anything we want to your computer, any time we want, and unless you have an enterprise license you can't stop us".

That is complete bullshit. If they're going to assert ownership of my computer, they can help me pay for it. Until they do, it's my computer.