Seems like the natural upgrade is to just have a tablet that can be on a charger AND support a credit/debit card reader at the same time. Bingo, cheap touch screen POS system. Is there one out there that already does this?

Card readers from Square and PayPal already work like you suggest, at least sort of: They connect to the headset jack in a very device-agnostic way. Any other ports are left unused.

These effects feed into each other, enforcing the effects and if kept unchecked will lead to a situation where a few players own the vast majority of the bitcoin supply. The pool of bitcoins not in their hands will dwindle as more and more of it is paid as interest to the large lenders, given continuous deflation and ultimately concludes in a credit crunch of epic proportions.

Eh? This implies that there is something to be gained by hoarding all of the bitcoin, instead of trading it for something else, whether that something else be goods, services, other currency, stocks, or whatever.

What good would it do someone (or a small group) to have ALL of the bitcoin? It'd cease to be a meaningful currency, which means that any hypothetical group that holds all of it won't let that happen...lest all of the interest they've earned turn into a pile of bits worth exactly nothing.

And, it can't happen overnight. Supposing that someone with a hoarding complex decides he wants all of the bitcoin, by the becomes a real issue folks with an interest in it will have long before started moving toward some other form of more liquid currency.

#1, because I couldn't bear to read any further:

In Ohio (at least), most city streets (as in, everything not otherwise-marked or a designated State Route) are restricted to 25 MPH.

Navigating a turn at an intersection in any vehicle at 30MPH is likely to get one all-sorts of fucked up if the road is not abundantly clear, because nobody around expects that.

In social aspects, it's also likely to alert your passengers to the fact that you're a madman, because you're going fast enough to scare them.

In traffic aspects, it's likely to catch the one vehicle that you didn't see off-guard -- even if the operator of that vehicle was generally succeeding at paying attention.

But on a bike? FFS: Everyone else is already trying to kill you. Don't press your luck. Assume that they're all of texting and drunk, while they also have to piss and are -very- high, while also stoned, fucked-up, and also need to dump a load. Meanwhile, they're concurrently groping for a lost (lit!) cigarette and somehow also managing to finger their girlfriend while they're also aiming directly at you because they both see you and have determined that you need exterminating. (Take all of this into consideration and you'll probably do fine for years, perhaps even decades...as long as you're not too bold about it.)

(Disclaimer: I drive an E36 BMW with sticky tires, and slowing down for a turn inside of a US city is always completely optional -- in fact, acceleration is also always an applicable option. But I still slow waaaay down when there is any visible movement, at all, when navigating a turn, and I give bikers and other vehicles all the breathing room necessary (even if it pisses off my fellow car-dwellers) for them to do what they're doing. Furthermore, I'd far rather be rear-ended by a few tonnes of someone with airbags and seatbelts than to run over a pedestrian or on any manner of lightly-armored vehicle like a motorcycle, scooter, Segway, bicycle, or similar because then, at least everyone probably lives .)

Oh. And I almost forgot:

And if you ARE Catholic, then you simply go to confession sometime afterward, and it's all cool.

Morally, at least. As so-defined.

YMMV (my own mileage certainly does vary).

it's not about being a hyperactive boy scout, it's not about the law, it's about living with myself. because if i am on the phone with someone while they are driving and i am AWARE of it, then i am responsible

Only if you are Catholic.

It used to be -lots- better, at least on the PS3 and on a real web browser.

They gimped it, apparently in a successful attempt to unify the interface with that of the shittiest of Netflix clients: Discount BluRay players that just happen to have some sort of Ethernet connectivity.

It is, IMHO, just another failure of lowest-common-denominator.

That said: Thanks for the link. Here is an RSS feed which lets you see the latest in Netflix. With Firefox's Live Bookmarks functionality turns into a handy dropdown of new shit.

SSDs have the huge advantage that everyone wants them. Every device needs fast access and transfer rates with low power usage in as small a space as possible.

Everyone?

I want a device with reasonable transfer rates, low cost, and high capacity, and that's what I put my own wallet behind.

Why? Well, for instance, I don't care how fast a 2-hour movie takes to start playing in my home theater -- whether it is 900 nanoseconds or 900 milliseconds, it's all the same to me. And the few Watts consumed by a cheap modern high-capacity drive don't make a meaningful dent in my electric bill.

Meanwhile, cheaper storage lets me buy more movies instead of fewer movies, and that's important to me.

Maybe in your bizzaro future world where everything is either portable and battery operated or magically In Teh Cloud, then everyone will care about the things you say they care about.

But as long as my BFT takes up most of a wall, and my amplifiers need multiple 20A circuits to avoid localized brownouts, I could give a fuck less about SSD. It offers no advantage to me in the applications where my storage needs are at all significant.

IMHO, of course.

I think you missed the class in Marketing wherein everyone else learned the following about pricing an item: Widgets are best sold at a price consistent with whatever the market will bear.

OTOH, when you're in the business of selling widgets, you can price them however you want. Maybe folks will buy them, maybe they won't. Maybe competitors will crush you in all possible ways, maybe they'll stay at bay.

Maybe you're altruistic enough to sell things at razor-thin margins for the good of the people, but somehow I think you'll put your own wants and needs (along with, hopefully, the wants and needs of the folks who help you produce and sell widgets) ahead of the desires of the consumer, as long as the market continues to bear your pricing (ie: buy your widgets).

We consumers all want to think we'd be happiest if hard drives were all sold at a loss (so that we could get more for less), but the simple truth is that removing profit from the equation is precisely why we're down to just the two-or-three manufacturers we've got to choose from instead of the dozens we've had previously.

I'd rather pay a few percent more and get to pick from Samsung, JVC, IBM, Quantum, Maxtor, Fujitsu, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Micropolis, DEC, Apple, Epson, MiniScribe, Mitsubishi, Tandon, and Wang, than have my available palette reduced to several manufacturers (at best).

YMMV.

If they ever attend a rock concert or watch a video of one (or if they ever take up electric guitar or bass) they'd see walls of them. Usually with big script logos that say "Marshall" or sometimes logos that say "Fender", "Soldano", or "Mesa-Boogie", with a few other brands that are less well-known and typically considered more "exclusive" like Matchless, Framus, Dr. Z, Top Hat, Divided by 13, Bad Cat, Victoria, etc etc.

Last time I was at a concert and saw a wall of Marshall full stacks with big heads on top, there was a microphone pointed at one of them. The rest of the cabinets were empty -- just props. As they loaded in and out, you could see daylight through the holes which were cut for the speakers.

(Modern PA plus a desire to reduce stage volume (and setup complexity, and weight, etc), etc. (and so on, and so forth))

At least TV's were partly repairable. Now the repair costs are often more than a new TV.

Hmm. A few months back my big LCD TV stopped working. I pulled the back off of it, did a casual visual inspection and found two bulging capacitors. I removed the capacitors, put them in my shirt pocket, and walked over to a nearby electronics shop to get new ones.

A little while (and $2.00) later, the TV is still working fine.

So, that's one repair in five years, and something like fourteen thousand hours of actual use. How many dozen times did your mom fix a TV, again?