If you believe in a patent system at all (which is a separate argument), an original implementation for a relatively obvious concept can still be patentable. Most patents I've seen start out by claiming something fairly obvious (a wheel) and have several progressively less obvious claims before getting to the core invention (a specific axle mounting design, etc.) and then maybe some variations. Most articles about patent abuse focus on the more obvious claims being obvious; that's separate from whether the more abusive actual cases are somebody getting a patent for the less obvious parts and then suing people for violating the much more obvious claims.

Since Uber's lost about 10 previous attempts, they may very well be trying to patent something obvious (charging more when it's busy), or may be trying to patent more specific things about their implementation (but maybe still obvious to the patent examiners, who've actually taken taxis before, even if they haven't written compilers or optimized databases.)

The politics that mattered weren't the ones with Chavez, it was the US pressure on anybody else. Cuba's a really convenient place to run cable, and there's some cable there, but the amount of actual service that it was carrying was very tightly restricted because of the US embargoes. The telcos would have been happy to run a lot more of it, but weren't allowed to.

It's not completely wireless; to get any reasonable bandwidth out to the users, you need fiber to the towers, not just T1 or radio uplinks, but that's not too hard to do. (As another poster says, the telco's run by the government, so they shouldn't have a problem getting permits, just the usual issues with new construction in old cities.)

No reason to use old phones - the newer standards are much more efficient at spectrum usage.

And there's been fiber to the island for a long time; the problem has been that the US embargoes on trade with Cuba severely limited the services the telcos could provide. To the extent that that was caused by Treasury regulations (which Obama can change for two years) rather than law (which requires the Republicans in Congress to cooperate), they can get some of that service running quickly.

By my late 40s I had to admit that I was probably middle-aged, and at 50 you really can't deny it, but 40? Not over the hill yet, plus it was still the boom years and everybody was having lots of fun doing new cool stuff and getting overpaid for discovering how to sell dogfood On The Internet!

Sure, some people will invest in Bitcoins, and other people will invest in racehorses. (I avoid the problem by mining Dogecoins, which are almost totally worthless.) That's missing the point of Bitcoin, which is that it's intended to be a currency for relatively-private transactions.

Unfortunately, the markets that most wanted a currency for relatively-private transactions didn't do as good a job as they should have about being relatively-private on their own end (i.e. Silk Road got busted), but there is still a market for legitimate transactions, as you've pointed out.

What you need is a good voice-only interface for your phone, and if possible in your clean-room environment, some kind of Bluetooth headset. Phone rings, you tell it "answer". If you want to do something, tell Siri or equivalent, and get voice feedback. Not being an iPhone user, I don't know if Siri's good enough. (The Android stuff I've used so far hasn't been, but my car's phone-dialing interface is at least a start.)

Get used to it, you'll have more of them as you get older.

One thing I hadn't really thought about before my mother-in-law's funeral was that, if you die when you're old, most of the people at your funeral other than your family will also be old - mobility and transportation were difficult for some of her friends, there were more people with wheelchairs than the restaurant we went to afterward really knew how to handle, and there were people who didn't come because it's just too difficult, and this might have helped them some. It's not the same as being there, but sometimes you can't.

Yup, that's the right thing to do.

I already ranted about fonts, but amiunique decided that my browser version (the one supported my the IT department at work) and time zone (UTF-8) and language (en-US) were enough to get uniqueness. Apparently everybody on the West Coast are running newer browsers :-)

Standard Mozilla behaviour last time this question came up is to include a list of fonts that your browser can display; I don't know whether other browsers do the same, or if they've changed it, but it's the kind of "feature" that hopelessly breaks your chances of non-uniqueness if you've ever installed fonts.

My work laptop has a font that's the Official Corporate-Branded font for $DAYJOB's corporate logo. Almost every Windows machine at my company has that (at least, every physical machine and the virtual machines running on the hosted virtual desktop cloud; there may be some lab machines that don't, and maybe some contractors, etc.) You might work for a smaller company that does the same. In my case, I've installed all sorts of other random fonts, either to see what they looked like, or simply because back in the 80s of course you wanted Elvish and Dwarvish fonts on your computer, or because I wanted a better monospaced programming font than the default MS one or Courier New.

Lots of other things leak information as well (cookies, etc.), but fonts are a quick and dirty way around identifying people who block those.

Laptop, not workstation; I'm usually not connected to a work LAN, so network drives are for backup and file exchange at best, not for data I actually use. (Email's theoretically also backed up on a server, though I'm not convinced that's reliable for anything older than a month or two.)

There's a project to get everybody to move to VMware-based Hosted Virtual Desktops, but I haven't bitten that bullet yet; it would let me access my stuff from different machines, but needs network connectivity to be usable and I lose control over some of my storage. (If Google Chromecast supported HVD, it might tempting to just leave the PC at work and use TV+Chromecast to telecommute :)

3D printing technology is changing much faster than I can come up with things I want to 3D-print, so it doesn't make sense to buy my own. If I want access to printers, there are places like TechShop that have them (hey, Bay Area Privilege is useful if you've got it), and I've heard that FedEx / Kinkos copier shops were also doing a pilot project with them (though it may have been in the Netherlands or Belgium and not the US yet.) Also, for slower turnaround, you can send your printer files to Shapeways and they'll print them and mail them to you.

But if you do want to buy one, I was in Home Depot the other day and there was a guy there demoing them, plus they have a whole display rack or two of Lasers, and probably a Robots section that didn't notice. It's really getting to be the Future!

Sure, you were joking, but the RepRap Project was about designing 3D printers that can print most of their parts so you can easily make more of them.

Where did you find cheap SDxC cards for 128-256GB? When I looked online a month or so ago (plus in Fry's today), they were reasonable up to 64GB, then expensive above that (except for no-name Chinese brands on Amazon that had reviews saying the capacities were fake.)

For USB2/USB3 flash sticks, they seem to be cheap up to 128GB, but with most laptop designs, that's going to stick out of the case, so I'd prefer SDxC cards that can stay installed, as long as I'm not using them for high-speed applications. (If I really believed that ReadyBoost accomplished anything, I'd be tempted to get a 16GB USB3 stick just for that, but I assume that makes a lot more difference on a spinning-disk machine.)

The cheapest ones at Fry's today were $40-45 for either 64GB SDxC or 128GB USB sticks. Since I've got just about 60GB of music I had to offload from my work laptop (new one had SSD that's smaller than the old hard drive), 64GB isn't quite enough so I'll wait around for Moore's Law to catch up.

The lease expired on my work laptop, and the new one has a 256GB SSD instead of the 320GB spinning disk the previous one had. It's not enough :-) Specifically, it's not enough to keep my ~60GB of music on, along with the actual work stuff, so that's temporarily off-loaded to an external drive, plus I had to off-load a lot more stuff for the "move almost all your stuff to the new machine" software to have working space.

And unfortunately, the IT department won't let me crack it open and add an extra spinning disk inside it. The state of the art in SD memory cards seems to be that 64GB cards are cheap, but 128GB cards are really expensive, so I'll probably wait six months for 128GB cards to get cheap and install one. 128GB USB3 flash sticks are getting to be cheap, but I can't leave one of them plugged in all the time.