Well I envy my cat in the same way: he's happily living his life hunting mice in the garden, eating his food, sleeping and getting petted by yours truly, blissfully unaware of how the food gets in his bowl, how the mice come to exist in the garden, how he gets to sleep warm and cozy even in the dead of winter, what his purpose is and how his life will end.

Comfy, care-free and appealing though a domestic cat's life may be, it doesn't mean I want to be a cat though. I much prefer having a brain big enough to look at the world in a more profound way, even if it can be unsettling.

The great thing about religion is, if you look at it with a critical mind and a little bit of reason, it's fairly quick and easy to dismiss as pure fantasy.

Religion is the opium of the people.

Google *is* evil - and greedy. I use their search engine for one thing only: looking for commercial vendor sites to purchase something. They're good for that. For anything else - fun, interesting non-commercial things, there are better search engines out there. DDG, Blekko... heck even Bing come to mind.

It's not negative, the older generation is just more jaded and has seen too many things like this turn into a fad to risk any significant amount of tangible worth on it. There is also the risk of association given the close links between BC and the digital underworld to consider, particularly when dealing with laypersons (many of whom might be in senior management); "You use Bit Coin? Isn't that used to buy drugs and stuff?" It's not some toy like a new programming language, Seti@Home, or an Arduino that you can hack around with and the only real risk is a bit of time and CPU cycles; you've got to put actual money on the line, and quite a bit of it if you want to mine productively. Those "flaws and nitpicks" that you mention are resulting in far too much of that money getting ganked, although admittedly, that's often the fault of the original owner failing to do their homework and making a silly mistake like trusting their BC to a third party that isn't deserving of that trust.

In my view, crypto currencies are still at v1.0, and we all should know the rule about ".0" releases, let alone "1.0" releases. As such, I find that it's an interesting notion but almost certainly doomed to be replaced by something new and improved once all the teething troubles and peripheral issues that we are currently seeing get addressed. I'm not really expecting the tech masses (including the jaded grey beards) to really embrace it until we start seeing the next generation of currencies and have some kind of framework in place to prevent most of those "flaws and nitpicks" without having to RTFM. Any possible mainstream public acceptance is probably only going to come once there are far more legitimate uses than illegitimate ones and it's generally seen as a safe and convenient thing to do, even for a complete n00b that's likely to click on a link to a file called "rootkit.exe", cancel the AV warnings and run it anyway.

The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.