What a coincidence! There's nothing I enjoy more about excuses about the nation which invented the internet not managing decent penetration with its massive budget.

If I remember what I read somewhere, the Russian/Soviet side lost something like 2500 tanks in the Winter War, mainly due to the Finns figuring out how to interfere with the treads to immobilize the tanks before setting them on fire...

A tank without a crew would go a long way in explaining how that happened, as there wouldn't be personnel to see the attack on the tank or to repel it while clearing whatever was used to jam the treads.

As a side note, that war explains why Biathlon is so culturally significant to the Scandinavian countries...

Nobody said that, and broadband penetration in the USA is pathetic, and frankly we cannot claim to be a modern nation while it's so poor. At best, we can claim to have some forward thinkers.

I moved there ages ago and moved away for the reasons you describe (less fracking) and another important one: The weather sucks for all but about two to four weeks a year.

Actually, E-Series short buses with the barest accomodations (for which most school buses would qualify) can be had new for that kind of price. You can still get a 2000 E-450 airport shuttle with a 7.3 powerstroke and a nice interior, especially compared to a school bus, for anywhere from $6k on up. Oddly, though, you can buy a used long bus with a Cummins for the same kind of money, and even at about the same age.

it's not that fantastic. I knew a dude who had a tour bus converted into an RV that would get 10+ MPG pulling two cars on a big trailer. And that's a way heavier bus. The big problem with modern buses is aerodynamics, they have none. Around town it's irrelevant. On the highway it's serious.

I pay my own way, and then some. Why don't you go cry about how you'd rather shit on everyone than help anyone to someone who is sympathetic to your crap?

So you're argument is Cruz might be an Obama of the right, roping in a lot of people and then carrying on as a progressive?

No, that he's an Obama of the Right, incompetent, self-absorbed and unable to make a difference on any of the important issues that matter to either of us.

You also make it virtually impossible for the average citizen to carry a firearm for self-defense, an activity that's allowed with very few questions in 43 of the 50 States. You can't even legally carry pepper spray in MA without a license, something that I'm pretty sure is allowed without a license in every other State in the Union.

Thanks, but no thanks. Plenty of States to choose from that don't regulate self-defense or abortion.

Umm, seriously?

And sadly, most nerds have very fragile psyches

Reading the comments to this article confirm this like nothing else I've seen.

Christ, it's a shitty operating system, marginally better than Windows 7, and you're making out like someone's raped your sister and then tweezed your nose hair. For fuck's sake, get some perspective.

I mean, do operating systems even matter any more? The only people who care about this are the sad sacks that do corporate end-user support...Oh wait, that's it isn't it? You have a shitty job and you're pissed at the world. Oh, OK. Carry on. Get it off your chest. You have precious little to live for, so if it makes you feel better to be the anti-MS Martin Luther and hammer your treatise to the church door, then by all means...

Who you calling "old", Sonny?

The blockchain is currently about 15GB, and grows every time there's a transaction. That's a problem. Most phones don't have 15GB of free space. You'd have to get an SD card, just to hold it and that is only a temporary solution, since it'll keep growing.

Also this would be a real problem if BTC was actually used like a major currency and not just played with by speculators as the number of transactions would be orders of magnitude higher, and thus so would the growth.

So it would be totally unrealistic to just store it on mobile devices, which is something you'd probably want to do if you were going to use it as a general purpose kind of payment system, security issues aside and those are not minor.

Only if you define "labor" in the widest possible sense. Creativity, ingenuity and craftsmanship as well as design, and, of course marketing go into the equation as well.

Your robot factory is purely theoretical. There is no 100% automated corporation anywhere on this planet nor will there be in the forseable future. You can automate some of the manual labor, but not the design, development, research and marketing that are equally necessary to generate revenue.

But even if you'd accept the theoretical concept of a fully automated factory, there are still humans in the equation, as the managers and owners of the factory. Wealth generation can use tools, and it doesn't matter if your tool is a hammer or a robot or a whole assembly line.

Yes, to the medium of exchange being an abstract concept. It doesn't matter if it's numbers or potatoes, if you use it as a medium of exchange, it is money, and as such it is abstract. It is abstract because the people who sell you something for a sack of potatoes aren't looking for ingredients for dinner, they are looking at the abstract monetary value of the potatoes.

The abstractness is not in it being printed paper or numbers in an electronic account, it is abstract because its value is not linked to the use of the actual physical entity. If it were, a dollar bill would be worth very little because you can't use it as note nor toilet paper and it doesn't burn very well, either. Likewise, if you'd use potatoes as units of exchange, the value of a sack of potatoes would very, very rapidly detach from the actual nutritional value of potatoes.

The block chain does not have names associated with it. Governments may well know that transactions have occurred, but they do not necessarily know who made the transactions, nor is there a method by which to automagically pay any required taxes during the transaction itself.