I tried taking a shuttle to the Minneapolis Hilton on my last trip to the US. I was told it would be there in 20 minutes and would take 25 minutes. For a tenth the price, there's a light rail service that runs every 15 minutes, takes about 25 minutes, and stops 5 minutes walk (or, for the exceptionally lazy, a short free bus ride) away from the hotel. I arrived at the hotel at about the same time as the shuttle. Given the price of the flight and the room, I'd have been happy to spend the money for the shuttle if it had got me there faster, but paying ten times as much for no time saving (and to sit in a more cramped form of transport - the light rail had loads of space, the shuttle was packed) didn't appeal.

At least in London, there are inspectors who pose as members of the public and take taxi rides. If they are refused or the driver doesn't take the most direct route, he can lose his taxi license.

Part of the reason for Orkut's decline in the US was that it was overrun by Portuguese speakers (mostly Brazilian) who posted (in Portuguese) in every English-language discussion, making the system unusable by anyone who didn't speak Portuguese. For the same reason, it remained popular where Portuguese was the national language or commonly spoken.

Anyway, you've got to love the message from Google: Use social networks, you're giving a third party the ability to kill your online presence and the identity that you use for communicating with your friends on a whim!

At the very least, the majority of advertising is aiming to make people buy things that they don't need. Beyond that, it's often stuff that's unhealthy or inferior to alternatives available at a lower price.

No they're not. For example, count the number of adverts that you're aware of in a film some time. Then look up how many careful product placements there are. See also, paid product reviews, social network endorsements, and so on. Most people are aware of a small fraction of the marketing targeted at them.

A significant amount of marketing is intended to cause harm to 100% of the user-base, so being ethically unsound doesn't appear to be a problem.

That depends on the volatility. If the price of bitcoin today is $600, but judging by previous trends, might swing to $200 tomorrow, then I'd probably just take the money. If it were a really sound choice, then my friend would be an idiot to offer it: he'd just sell the bitcoin, give me the $400, and pocket the $200. Volatility in a market is generally related to the ratio of speculators (people who just buy and sell the commodity but neither produce nor consume it) to producers and consumers. You need some speculators to provide liquidity (when you produce something, it's good if you can find a buyer now, even if no one wants it yet and it's someone who's just buying it in the hope that they can sell it later), but if their trades start to dominate the market then you get lots of volatility.

The volatility of bitcoin has dropped off a bit recently, but it wasn't long ago that it was considered stable if it only had 25% swings in the value over the course of a day. That is the last thing that you want form a currency. If someone pays me a token in exchange for some work, then I hope to be able to exchange that token for something of approximately equal value when I need to. A small amount of inflation is fine (you don't want people hoarding the tokens, you want an incentive for people with spare capital to invest it in real things), but it should be predictable.

It's also possible with smartgrid things to tweak the demand curve a bit. For example, a fridge or freezer needs to keep the contents in a temperature range with a little bit of leeway. It will typically let things warm until they're near the top of the range, then run the compressor until they're close to the bottom of the range. If your freezer knows about the spot price of electricity, then you may set it to an economy mode, where it will start the compressor early if power is sufficiently cheap, so by the time the price goes up (i.e. supply drops) you're effectively storing energy by having the entire contents of the freezer at the bottom end of its temperature range. The same is true for electric cars - if you're using one to commute and the battery will last a few days, then the amount that you're willing to pay for electricity varies based on how low the battery charge is. If it doesn't have enough for tomorrow's commute, then you'll pay more. If it does, then you'd happily top-up the charge cheaply when there's some surplus supply.

Transmission losses matter a lot less when generation doesn't cost you anything. If you have a coal power plant and demand drops, you burn less coal and lower your costs. When demand increases, you burn more coal and make more money. With a wind power plant, if the wind is blowing but demand drops then your choice is either 100% loss by just wasting the power, or something less than 100% loss by transmitting it. For very long distances, the same transmission mechanisms that we use for fossil fuels are applicable: store it in chemical form and put it in trucks / trains / boats. Whether the chemical form is hydrogen, diesel, aluminium, or something else is up to you.

Little discs of metal and rectangles of paper / fabric / plastic are also quite lacking in use. There's nothing wrong with Bitcoin (aside from the tracking aspects) if you think of it as a digital coin. The problem is thinking that just because you can stamp out a load of coins that you now have a lot of wealth. The US dollar has a value because the Federal Government will enforce your ability to use it to settle debts held by US citizens and will accept it as payment in taxes. Cryptocurrencies are a good way of exchanging tokens, but just being able to exchange tokens doesn't mean that you've exchanged something of value.

Cell gives you far too coarse-grained information for that to be useful. GPS uses more power than leaving the WiFi on in receive-only mode.

If by 'valid fear' you mean 'prejudice-inspired paranoia', then your statement may be true.

Turning off WiFi when you're out of range of a base station is easy. Turning it back on when you come back in range is hard...

I'd rather have a Thunderbolt port on the phone and put everything else (external GPU, SATA controller, GigE controller, and so on) in a PCIe dock.

Comparing mA is stupid without also comparing voltage. The USB can provide 500mA at 5V, which is 2.5W. There are also modes for higher power, but they require negotiation. The Qi charging spec allows delivering up to 5W to low-power devices, 120W to high-power ones.

They're different numbers. Wolphram Alpha says 44oz of Pepsi is 503 Cal, which is 25% RDA. It also says it's 46% of the RDA for carbohydrates. RDA for sugar is 90g for women, 120g for men, and it contains 139g of sugar, so that's 115%-154%, depending on your gender. Putting that number on the cup ('this contains 150% of your recommended daily amount of sugar') would be even better.