Is the ASUS Transformer Book, a 10" convertible laptop computer, not "modern" because it ships with only 2 GB of RAM?

Besides, not all computers still in use are modern. I do most of my web browsing on a four-year-old Dell Inspiron mini 1012, a 10" laptop that came with only 1 GB of RAM and runs Xubuntu. Flashblock helps keeps Firefox below half a GB, after which point the bottleneck is not memory but the fact that Firefox uses only half of the CPU. Though an Atom has two-way simultaneous multithreading, Firefox is still single-threaded which brings a longer wait for complicated JavaScript and CSS to finish processing, especially on things like Cracked.com or Slashdot beta. My first-generation ASUS Nexus 7 tablet computer is stuck at 1 GB as well.

A lot of computers without a rotating hard drive, such as my Nexus 7, can't afford to swap. Instead, they have a harsher OOM killer.

I'm guessing that when no application is using part of the RAM, the chipset could power down unused RAM to prolong battery life.

I know Bitcoin payment is not the only reason to subscribe to cellular Internet access. I just haven't seen a reason worth $400 per year.

True, some people already have a smartphone, but not everyone does. Someone paying $7/mo for service on a cell phone used only for urgent calls might have to pay five times as much ($35/mo) for service on a phone that supports Bitcoin payment.

I see it as more like people who currently have normal home electric service (120 V AC) and would have to upgrade to 3-phase with a hefty surcharge per month in order to install a specific appliance.

That just shifts costs from the merchant to the buyer, who now has to pay the telco a recurring fee for a cellular data connection.

I don't see how that's true, for three reasons. First, the featured article states that the vehicle was stopped while the phone was in use. Second, a DA's decision not to prosecute isn't exactly a "precedent" in the common law sense. Third, even if the officer had been found not guilty in a court of law, another judge could apply the narrower precedent that police are above the distracted driving law but not necessarily above other laws.

In other words, you already to be claiming that in-person Bitcoin payment is more likely to take off in your country than in countries with more expensive cellular service, such as the United States.

Why, when Microsoft itself will stop issuing security updates for IE 8 in January 2016?

The whole reason for things like jQuery is that under old IE, the web browser wasn't capable of doing a lot of these things itself. If you go to the You Might Not Need jQuery site and set the compatibility slider to IE 8, for example, a couple solutions end up as "just use jQuery". Not needing massive workarounds for deficiencies in the latest version of the included web browser on a still-supported PC operating system is a relatively new concept. Five months ago, a Windows operating system that couldn't be upgraded past IE 8 was still in extended support.

I don't see who would be willing to pay $400 per year to subscribe to 4G just to be able to spend bitcoins.

I guess the reasoning is that people behind a static IP probably don't need UPnP. If you pay extra for a static IP, you're probably doing so because you have more computer networking knowledge than the average user of the WWW, and you can just use your Internet gateway's configuration panel to forward incoming port ranges to particular machines.

From the featured article:

Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards.

I'm curious how long Microsoft will continue improving Internet Explorer for Windows 7. Microsoft has historically ended development of new IE features once a particular version of Windows goes into extended support. This means Windows Vista is stuck on IE 9, and unless IE 12 comes out before January 2015, Windows 7 will be stuck on IE 11. In any case, even IE 9 supports enough of the W3C DOM that you might not need jQuery or any other monolithic framework in your site's JavaScript. People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

I can think of one downside: People might be less willing to pay with Bitcoin if they don't get the protections that they'd get from their bank's credit or debit card. Besides, how would one go about spending without Internet access, such as while inside a brick-and-mortar store with no guest Wi-Fi?

Was this true even during the days of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, when the Nintendo DS couldn't use anything but WEP? Or did you just skip the DS?

So when you're setting up a home network for a relative who lives far away and is not technically inclined, and you have to troubleshoot it, do you make plans to get on an airplane whenever something goes wrong?

Except on machines that do not support OpenVPN, such as a video game console.

That's a lot of electric power to waste on leaving two computers on 24/7 just so that you can troubleshoot problems with a router belonging to a not-so-technically-inclined relative who lives far from you.

In the era of IPv4 address exhaustion and IPv6 foot-dragging, more and more users end up behind carrier-grade NAT. To serve these users, more and more applications are being written to bounce traffic off a server so that the client can get away with making only outbound connections.