Jed did a great deal, but Ryan Fugger is the person who founded Ripple. You're thinking of Ripple Labs(or Opencoin)

Great! Don't agree to anything. Download the source which is available on github, and run it yourself, and connect to the network yourself. No one is preventing you from doing this.

Actually Ripple predates Bitcoin by a number of years.

You could have said the same thing about personal computers. Most users who use Ripple may not even know they are using it, just like computers (most people who use computers do not realize that that thing in their hand that allows them to look at youtube is a computer)

No, it's potentially available in any neighbourhood with a ripple user to the extent that there are sufficient connections between *your* neighbourhood and *that* one.

You do not have to use Gateways to use Ripple. If someone "credits" you 100$ then you should talk to that someone on how to retrieve it. Sometimes they may be connected to gateways, sometimes they are connected to the bitcoin bridge or some other bridge and you can use an exterior system. Sometimes not.

Did you ever see Christopher Walken in "Pulp Fiction"? ;-)

Information wants to be free. Sony demands. Anthropomorphism requires.

Q: If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?

TOM!

"Uh, Tom... Tom... Actually, from now on, we're the comedy team of Ahjnudpippibod and Davis."

They've outgrown the confines of Guantanamo Bay.

I know all that. Don't forget, I've lived here my whole life and know the mailbox companies. Let the Caymans and Co have them. It's not as if they actually leave money here (tax rates close 0 benefit no one except corporations).

For years, the only thing this served was to try to get votes in Florida. And even then, I do not know how much good that did.

Either Obama has written off the Cuban vote in Miami or he has decided to concede FLA to the GOP. Either way, Obama has finally done something right.

Opening up relations with Cuba makes too much financial sense for pride or antiquated ideas of anticommunism to get in the way.

Told kid about nano-cam dust today. He's only 4 years old, so he didn't know about them yet, and I'm trying to teach him basic hygiene. I explained for that for nearly a a hundred years we have all lived in an environment where other peoples' cameras are always in our homes. We track them in, on our shoes. The AC intake blows them in. The servers the cameras send video too, aren't owned by people who are practicing subterfuge. It's not like they snuck "spy" dust onto our porches in the hopes we'd track them in. It just happens; it's an inevitable consequence of the stuff blowing around everywhere.

My great grandparents complained about it. They thought they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, because nanotech was new. They didn't see the dust, so they didn't know it was there. In the absence of sensual confirmation, the default expectation (at least to the layman) was that it wasn't there. That was naive, but my grandparents didn't work with nanotech or even use consumer models themselves, so perhaps their ignorance could be forgiven. (Just as my own ignorance of hyperspace can perhaps be forgiven, since I'm not a miner.)

My grandparents, though, grew up with the stuff, though it was still a bit expensive, so it wasn't totally ubiquitous yet. By their time, almost everyone at least knew about it, and if in a gathering of any five people you were to say "nobody sees me inside my home," chances were there would have been a few guffaws and someone would likely point out that the statement was likely incorrect. Sometimes the stuff got innocently tracked into your house, and sometimes it was manipulated into getting there, through subterfuge. The law and social norms lagged, though, and people debated privacy a lot.

By the time their children (my parents) grew up, though, it was all over. Everyone knew about nano-cam dust, and unless you did a rad-flash a few minutes earlier, fucking in your own bed was just as public as doing it in Times Square.

And now my kid knows too. It's just something everyone is expected to know about and deal with. If I were to write a story about it, I think I would set the story in the time of my grandparents, back when society was truly conflicted and in the midst of change. I bet those were interesting times.