Or Microsoft found out they must cede the battle to avoid losing the war. That doesn't mean Valve should get complacent, once you make a threat like that it'd better stay credible. If they back down too far Microsoft might try for a blitzkrieg shoving the Microsoft Store down users' throat before Valve has time to rekindle the SteamOS project. At the same time they don't want Steam to go mainstream to avoid making it a real enemy to Windows.

That's because you don't want to get between a land whale and his supersized Big Mac with extra cheese and bacon, double onion rings and bucket of Coke.

So what? Since there's no central authority to block transactions or seize funds they'll simply be passed around until any relation with the crime is meaningless with almost everybody in the transaction chain is blissfully unaware that somewhere they were stolen. Then what? If you find the person behind the wallet and seize the "stolen property", you introduce a massive transaction risk that totally undermines the cryptographic guarantee that the transaction is final and irreversible. Imagine the following scenario, you sell a car for bitcoins. The bitcoins come in, transaction is verified, you hand over the keys. Then you try to spend your bitcoins only to be told that they're stolen, we have the serial numbers and is returning them to their rightful owner. Now you have no bitcoins and no car and good luck recovering it.

Imagine if cash was that way, every time the grocery store tried to despoit money at the bank the bank would say "oh no, this and that bill came from a gas station robbery two years ago so we'll return it to the gas station and deduct it from your deposit. The system would crumble as cash couldn't be trusted to really have the cash value it says, even if it's a genuine bill. Everyone with money of questionable origin would pass it off to others who can't and won't verify their legitimity and let others pick up the tab. By all means, if the cops can uncover a whitewashing operation that's fine but once it's passed back into normal circulation again you can't suddenly take away that value.

No, but there's 137 people who can each legitimately say "If I hadn't put my machine in the trash, I'd be $900k-ish richer". And I'm not sure how quick the value drops off but I doubt going from 63 to 200 machines (about 3x) would be worse than inverse square so (1/3)^2 * $900k = $100k/machine, that's also a nice chunk of cash.

utopia = ideal, perfect state
unicorn = magical, legendary creature

I think you'd roll your eyes too if Apple or Microsoft came out with OS X 10.10 "Magic Perfection" or Windows 10 "Magic Perfection", respectively. It's the kind of name that makes you go "Okaaaaaaaaay, are you overcompensating for something?"

Not a whole lot of people I knew and having your own hosting and domain costs a bit, most used third party blogs and forums anyway. And it all lacks authentication and aggregation. Sure, you could set up users and accounts and manage all that but people wouldn't bother to manage 100 separate accounts the way they have 100 friends on one Facebook login. And unless every site it set up with an RSS feed there's no easy way to aggregate lots of blogs and give you one dashboard of what your friends are doing. Nothing really unsolvable though, you could have self-hosted for yourself and third party hosted nodes for other people but there'd have to be a business model for the hosting companies. People generally won't pay when they can get a "free" account on Facebook so then most are really back to ads or data mining for most people anyway.

They all have your data, they can do whatever the f... they want with it. Unless you're talking about a client backdoor to access all the other files you didn't want to share with the cloud, but I don't think any of the others are any better. If you want real control, it's ownCloud or no cloud I think...

More like you accuse someone of defamation and it's the difference between "He told people I'm an asshole" and "He told people I'm a child molester". Both are defamatory statements by definition "1. (Law) injurious to someone's name or reputation)" but only one is actually illegal. Even if you're selling a polished turd you can make a lot a objectively highly questionable praise, misleading statistics and lies by omission without actually incriminating yourself. Like the defamation example above, you usually have to be caught in a factual lie in order to be convicted. Every sales pitch strategy I've been involved in involved pushing our strengths and concealing our weakness, if that was illegal we'd have to put all of marketing and sales in jail. And every person who went on a date ever. Meaning /. won't change much, I guess.

And all the unions can do is stab him

Of course they are. What else can you do when someone is trying to murder you?

As far as Illinois' fiscal problems, they started under Thompson (R), who wanted to both cut taxes and increase spending (sound familiar?). Edgar (R) followed his footsteps, as did Ryan (R). The screaming didn't start until Blago (D) and it's still a terrible problem, but is slowly improving.

Ryan and Blago both went to prison for bribery. Thompson (R) unsuccessfully defended Blago in his bribery trial (note that even Johnny Cochran and F. Lee Baily together wouldn't have been able to keep him out of the slammer).

The current Republican candidate, who "earns" a thousand times the median income, wants to tax my pensions, my social security, haircuts, food, medicine, while slashing both his own taxes and school funding.

No way in hell could I vote for that guy.

Assuming the need is infinite, if your demands are satisfied you might turn to flexibility and convenience. Last quarter we here in Norway saw a tiny dip in fixed residential broadband for the first time ever, whether that's a fluke or not is uncertain but business lines have been on the decline for some time because small 1-5 man shops use 3G/LTE to check their mail rather than having a dedicated broadband line in the office. It's just an extension of that most "normal" people I run into use wireless now instead of wired networks because it's capped by their Internet speed anyway. And even if you gave them gigabit Internet, they'd probably still feel wireless was fast enough.

This. Actual stamps is mostly a consumer thing, I just checked our commercial postal service and they recommend a "stamping" machine if you send more than 40 letters/week where you charge it up like a prepaid cell phone, same thing for packages except there they normally print to labels they slap on the package. And for the big companies you get bulk pre-printed envelopes with logo that are collected at your place of business and charged to your corporate account, we have those at work. The potential for abuse is small since you can't drop them off at a regular mailbox and it'd be obvious who you're using to pay for your postage. A lot of the consumer-to-business mail is prepaid and rolled into the cost of business too, the few times I use stamps is to other people but most of that is replaced by email since you don't need a formal signature on anything. I guess there's the odd package, but if it's too big to fit a mail box you're going to the post office anyway.

Of the "let's frame it and put it on a wall" more than "I want one in my pocket" variety. I'll always have fond memories of Nokia 3210 and the state of the art in 1999, but it's not selling a new phone and it's not quite up to collectible/antique standards either. And Elop's little stunt sure didn't help Nokia's reputation as a has-been either. Not to mention that Nokia running Windows Phone might have some of the same hardware but there's very little in common between "old Nokia" and "new Nokia" anyway. I think this was a pretty easy call of Microsoft and would have happened regardless, if they'd ponied up a little more they could have gotten the Nokia name for good as it matters more to consumers than the commercial market the remains of Nokia serves.

Because Facebook is really interested in their stock value and not kicking the DEA in the teeth? They're not going to win any favors with anybody for actively sabotaging a criminal investigation, even an illegally conducted one. They want to have the public on their side which is why we're hearing about this in the news, Facebook couldn't win an escalating conflict with proxies and whatnot. If this becomes a big enough PR problem for the police though, the practice might go away.

> it is indeed the case that nonlocal businesses are more likely to use Maersk for shipping, since there are so many more of them.

Thanks for the confirmation. You really are an idiot.

I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was talking to an idiot. If local businesses are more likely to use Maersk for shipping, then it would be better for Maersk to use local businesses, for its own sake. Clearer now?