Although the main argument of the linked article on why it's more expensive, is that people tend to hold on to coins (put them in useless jars) rather than use them, so the government had to produce 1.6 dollar coins for each 1$ paper billed replaced.

In the linked PDF file [1], search for "1.6", you will find this sentence in the same paragraph:

"However, in both cases, once the transition was complete, coin
production was very low or even nil in some years. Therefore, we
determined that a 1.5-to-1 replacement rate would be appropriate for our analysisâ"low enough to avoid an excess of $1 coins without creating an undue risk of producing too few."

It was only a transition issue, there is no mention about people forgetting about those coins in jars. A 1$ coin is useful, it's what is usually given as a tip for a beer in a pub, so I find the argument that people put them in jars kind of odd..

[1]Âhttp://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11281.pdf

I rarely have more than 3-4 dollar coins in my wallet. You can easily use them on a payment.

1 or 5 Â coins, on the other hand, keep accumulating unless you want to waste time counting the exact cash while other people are waiting in line. I'm glad Canada is getting rid of the 1Â.

The attachment of people in the US to their dollar bill reflects how hard, as a nation, it is to move forward.. people are strongly attached to silly symbols.

What kind of challenges will they face? It's not like they're turning off IPv4. Sites will be dual-stack, and many of them have been for quite some time already.

Google/Youtube, Facebook and many other mainstream sites have already enabled IPv6 on June 6th 2012.

PS: Comcast has been enabling IPv6 by default to some of their customers (5% ?). I was in a small US country-side hotel in March 2012, they had really broken NAT, but their IPv6 was working fine. I also have dual-stack native IPv6 at home (Canada, TekSavvy ISP). Works great, lots of fun to route public subnets to access points and routers that connect with neighbours. I even announce my address block on our neighbourhood mesh network.

We're not there yet, our network is relatively small and geeky, we're installing lots of antennas these days (we just did a bulk order of 25 ubnt bullets with 15dbi antennas, and aprox 10-12 nodes already running).

Most mesh routing protocols have features to limit bandwidth. It's also possible to control that on the exit node (those who provide Internet connectivity).

A fun thing about mesh networks: the more users you have, the more capacity there is (more nodes relaying traffic). The challenge is then on the exit nodes, and there's ways to control that. However, I think that as Byzantium is doing, we want to rely as much as possible on inter-mesh usage (apps that are "auto-discovery-happy" and decentralized).

For example, our wiki runs ikiwiki, which, thanks to its git backend, allows us to run multiple "master" instances.

oops, I meant: babeld or batman-adv

Seriously? In a flood, earthquake or political uprising, you food, water and shelter, obviously, but you will need communications too.

That's like saying we shouldn't focus on software freedom because there is still lots of hunger in the world, dictators and corporate overlords running wild. We do what we do because we're good at it.

So what are you up to? :)

Why not simply flip your WiFi port from 'infrastructure' to 'ad-hoc'?

In regular ad-hoc, you can see the people around you, but not reach their neighbours (there is no routing by default). Byzantium uses babeld, which is a routing layer over an "ad hoc" mode. The mesh network automatically recalculates routes, depending on their signal and link saturation. If you're into networking, it's really trivial to setup and lots of fun (especially with ipv6, although ipv4 works too of course).

We're building a mesh network in Montreal, putting antennas on our roofs or windows. It's impressive what can be done with OpenWRT running babeld or babeld, and 100$ or less worth of hardware. Also a nice way to connect various free software hacking groups, and.. neighbours. http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca/

Check out also: http://freenetworkfoundation.org/

If you think that's creepy, checkout:
http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/elections-quebec-2012/carte-du-financement-politique-au-quebec/

Since 2011, any amount over 200$ was made public by the organisation overseeing elections. Since 2012 all amounts are public. This is (in part) to counter corporate fraud. Companies are not allowed to donate directly to political parties, so they ask their employees to do so.

Here are two PCB sellers in HK who ship overseas:
http://www.onepcbsolution.com/
http://www.hkmingdi.com/enindex.asp

I found them off the forum of this site:
http://www.deadharddrive.com/

I wrote a short post about it in French, you can probably run it in google-translate. It took me a bit of time to figure out the PCB number on my Seagate drive, which is on the PCB, but on the side facing the disk, so I had to unscrew it to obtain it. (both HK sites were helpful and responded to my e-mails in good English).
http://www.bidon.ca/fr/random/2011-04-12-disque-dur-ressuscite

As the GP, I once had a burnt component on a PCB of a hard disk. I changed it using the *exact* model of the disk, and it worked. The disk was 100$ for a 500GB off eBay, which is a bit expensive, but afterwards I had a brand new disk to keep (I put the PCB back on the new disk once I finished retrieving the data). The seller on eBay provided the complete serial number in order to make it easy to find the correct replacement disk.

There are also companies in Hong Kong that specialize in selling replacement PCBs. It's much cheaper, but bigger delays.

I guess I shouldn't feed the trollls.. but :

I could survive with a phone running Windows, or even Vax VMS. I just wouldn't use it as much and would be far less amusing, secure and providing less freedom. Anyway, it's just a gadget, and one in decline, I'd argue.

(I, for one, would welcome a VMS smart phone. If Microsoft did it, why not VMS?)

I don't know for the OP, but many of us still cling to our aging Nokia N900 running Maemo. Easy to hack/play, free as in freedom, based on Debian.

That doesn't seem to me like a particularly good example. The reporter is being a dick and in most other languages this sort of behavior would have been classified as "undefined".