Precisely. My Nokia is a much better phone by virtue of the fact that it doesn't try to be anything but a phone. It has one job to do, and it does it well with a much more compact and energy efficient package than a "smartphone" that is neither as good a phone as my Nokia nor as good a computer as my PC, compromising its ability to do either well by trying to be both at once.

Came here to say the exact same thing, though I was going to go with Abrahamic =)

More than an upper limit. Unless the planet is a captured rogue, knowing the age of the star gives you the age of the planet, pretty much. If you know the age of someone's heart, you know the age of their head, too (transplant patients excepted).

Yeah, I was kind of thinking the same thing.

When my mom and dad were 65/69, I bought them a Winbox simply because that is what everyone else has, so getting software and help would be trivial. That was 15 years ago and they are on their 3rd. Mom isn't here anymore but dad uses Skype, plays poker games (I send them game CDs) and such and he is in his 80s. We Facebook daily.

Sometimes "best" simply means what is most common, or maybe what you, the one who is going to be helping him, is familiar with. For him, the Winbox was handy because he could use it sitting down and the screen is big.

8 people, eh? Well that's a representative sample. Of fuck all.

Let me know when the mothership arrives.

I'd tell him he's being fucking stupid and tell him to get his kids vaccinated before he gets somebody killed. Want fries with that?

The amount of trust in a currency depends on custom. If Bitcoins become widely used in some Chinese regions then they'll gain acceptance, and it might spread.

Northern Ireland bank notes, which are printed by various banks according to their own designs and are branded as "pounds sterling", are not actually legal tender. They're a hangover from an old law that let regional banks print their own money in place of currency issued by the Bank of England. But people in Northern Ireland use them and think nothing of it, including transactions between total strangers. The notes are met with a bit more scepticism when you try to use them in England though.

The only thing stopping Northern Ireland bank notes from gaining wider acceptance in Britain is the Irish Sea which has a tendency to slow down the flow of money across the water. Plus, seasoned travelers change their local notes for Bank of England notes when going to England because they know that the regional notes are going to be harder to spend. So that keeps a vicious circle going of unfamiliarity that undermines trust.

The No-Fly list does not allow the person on chartered private flights, and it even denies a person from flying overseas into Canada or Mexico. There are even reports that DHS will go further and attempt to block a person from taking a ship into the US as well, US citizen or not.

The US DID intern Arab-Americans in the week after 9/11, in mass roundups and arrests, and almost all of them were later released without charge nor apology. Then the government began a series of interrogations, fingerprinting, and in many cases deportation proceedings in 2002 for thousands of Arab and Muslim green card holders and immigrant families.

How about "if the system is corrupt then you've got no choice but to work within the corrupt system"?

I'm thinking it's a company in the media realm and I can tell you our marketing department is the only place other than the datacenter or the network core where we've considered 10Gb due to the size of files they deal with. 802.11ac will end up below 100Mbps for a crowded office which is just going to suck when dealing with multi-hundred MB PSD files of worse video.

Instead of getting my programmers from Glasgow, I am sending my current programmers -- broke, penniless, desperate -- to live on the streets of Glasgow for a year.

Those that survive the ordeal will return to my Xanadu-like pleasure palace, where they will serve out their remaining years in matchless luxury.