Butt-hurt is the Right's fallback position for everything.

They live to be victims. Victims of a "war on christmas" or "violation of religious liberty" everytime someone says, "Happy Holidays". If someone asks a right-wing political candidate what they read, it becomes a "gotcha" question. If gays are allowed to marry, it becomes an "attack on the institution of marriage" as if two women going to city hall and getting a license is going to cause wives to start running out on their husbands.

There was a story this week on a "parody news" website about a schoolkid who was suspended because he wished his atheist teacher merry christmas. Of course, it wasn't true, but that didn't stop the Top Conservatives on Twitter from howling in outrage and death threats from pouring into the fictional teacher.

This imagined victimization has been cultivated by the Right for decades. Nobody should be surprised that it's been so effective on the knuckleheads.

And by the way, I am so proud that I have no idea what a "Duck Dynasty" is. I must be getting really old when I celebrate every instance of a new cultural phenomenon of which I am blissfully unaware.

Very uaseful for law enforcement to kill the smartphones of anyone they consider problematic, like leaders of streets protests or occupy movements.

Remember to keep that 50' 18 gauge extension cord running, that you're using to charge your new Tesla, under it. It helps keep the garage smelling nice. :)

It's definitely worth considering, and if you haven't read the original article, you should. I don't agree with ALL of his points. E.g., I'm not at all convinced that an untraceable currency is a bad idea. Other of his points, however, are plausible. And one reason I came here was to see if anyone had and counters.

E.g., an inherently deflationary currency (becoming arbitrarily expensive to generate new values as the easy ones are computed) does seem like a bad idea. What would be better would be a currency where each new value required a fixed amount of effort, and where it would slowly decay in value if it weren't being transferred. (A half-life of 20 years seems about right, if the original creation of the value isn't too difficult.) But actual radio-isotopes aren't desirable, because you don't want it to be dangerous. Also it would be nice if trading it increased it's value.
N.B.: I don't say that such a currency is any ideal. Or has any plausibility. But I have my doubts about a currency with a fixed number of tokens of value.

It's also true that malware that mints bitcoins has already been discovered. So that worry about them isn't a hypothesis. One might wonder just how common such malware would become, but if they increase in value, one can expect that it will become more common. So that point of his is plausible.

Etc.

And I thought phones these days were packed with multi-frequency band capabilities to allow that crap.

Or at least to make it cheaper for device manufacturer by selling one phone capable for all networks. But hey, I don't know the US mobile landscape.

I think you missed the part about the transition from pre-Singularity to post-Singularity involving a removal of 90% of the population, and THEN experiencing a large die-off.

Yes, what they ended up was was pretty good, though it certainly had it's problems (see "unscheduled criticality excursion", or Rachael's old job), but getting there was miserable. And that's the part we would get to try to live through.

Thanks. That's probably the only viable solution, and I hadn't considered using VPN.

Thanks, but I've already got that. I'm not interested in tediously downloading something before I can listen to it. That's not my definition of "simple". The SFTP/SCP part needs to be transparent. I should be able to see all my stuff on my server as if it were on the phone... just like I can with Amazon's MP3 player.

Exactly what I had in mind when I said that. :)

Dangerous? How about massively increasing the time it takes to do basic administrative tasks. I've spent so much time trying to do things in Server 2012 that were absolutely simple from NT 3.5 to Server 2008 that I am officially now rebelling against their stupid Metro interface. Everything is fucked up.

Try debugging an L2TP VPN connection using the silly new interface - you pass from old school to Metro to old school to Metro three times. It just ain't worth it.

They can make a new UI, but nobody's gotta accept or use the damn thing.

Even that Windows 8.1 laptop I was talking about in my parent post: I messed with that for two months. Two days ago I reloaded the thing with Windows 7. I have work to get done, don't have the time to mess with the latest Microsoft fad. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

So what you're saying is that it's time to found the Open Keyboard Alliance?

(Actually it probably is, considering the fact that you could fit an entire SoC, complete with wireless connection to the NSA, in a keyboard these days.)

"Asshole?" No. "Extremist?" I'd say so. (But that's a feature, not a bug!)

Hey it worked in Star Trek...

And FISA wasn't "intended" to allow the NSA to spy on Americans. But you can see how that worked out!