But Bitcoin is (almost) infinitely divisible; you would just adjust your prices downward and uses smaller amounts. I think the presupposition that a money supply needs to grow with an economy is bunk. What are the drawbacks to deflation (if you're not a banker)?

Remember Hushmail? Turns out they were logging traffic after all. I would never trust a random VPN to not log traffic.

I'm currently at a university and don't bother running a VPN, but I'd check out AirVPN. They allow you to pay with BitCoin, so that they don't even have your payment information.

As I homeschooled guy, now a college undergrad, I think you are wrong. Perhaps you've just met the wrong homeschoolers. My own homeschool curriculum was partially in the form of satellite broadcasts that we recorded with programmable VCR's (and eventually programmable DVD recorders). I have many younger siblings still at home (10, actually), and they are transitioning some of it to computers by ripping the archived DVD's. The school room has almost a dozen TV's and monitors, along with desks and bookshelves. Ironically enough, my dad is a public high-school math teacher, which has contributed to our decision to home school. (All the failures of public education, religion, etc.)

One of my closest friends here at college was home schooled; his family stored everything on a NAS and piped it around a home network. Another family I've met at church here has three high-school sons currently being homeschooled, and they are very tech-savvy. (Incidentally, they also hold the current world championship for 3-player teams in the Age of Empires III ladders.)

Where are these technophobe homeschoolers? Yes, I'm giving anecdotes, but it was really easy to think of them, and I could list more.

That. I wish I could buy a billboard in front of wherever Mozilla's people work and put up:

If we wanted Chrome, we'd use Chrome. Bring back Firefox.
Sincerely,
Everyone who used Firefox before the versions numbers went haywire

in MASSIVE text as a daily reminder of the old glory days.

Seriously, I shouldn't have to rearrange and twiddle with everything to get Firefox as much like 3.6 as possible every time I install it. What true UI improvements have we had since then? I can think of two: tabs that don't resize while I'm hovering on them, and tab groups. Why was the rest of it randomized?

Also, what's with the stupid launch defaults? I close Firefox when I want a clean slate, not a glorified minimize. "Restore my windows and tabs from last time" is antithetical to the whole idea of closing all the tabs! Can you imagine if Windows restored all your programs and junk from last time? People would come unglued.

Also, we live in an age of large LCD displays. I can spare a few pixels of screen space to keep the bookmarks and buttons I use all day long visible instead of burying them somewhere underneath gloss and shiny.

One last gripe: Tools > Add-ons should take me to Extensions, not the "Wonderful World of Stuff You Could Bloat Your Firefox With." I go to Add-ons to remove extensions other programs installed without asking far more often than I feel the urge to add bloviated toolbars. Speaking of which, can we finally make Firefox ask before allowing programs (like nearly every AV, Skype, whatever) to hang their useless (or worse, Google-search-invading) lampshade in Extensions?

He is a Republican, much to the party's chagrin. We had our first primary caucus two days ago, and Paul did well:

Mitt Romney ----- 30,015 - 24.6%
Rick Santorum --- 30,007 - 24.5%
Ron Paul -------- 26,219 - 21.4%
Newt Gingrich --- 16,251 - 13.3%
Rick Perry ------ 12,604 - 10.3%

He might be our last best hope, if he's doesn't have an "accident."

It's quite easy: put CyanogenMod on it and you're good to go. The Motorola bootloader was this past summer, so whatever phone you have probably has a build now.

Couldn't they take Android as a base and built their lauded security and centralized control back into the codebase? Sure, it'd be tough, but it's not impossible. They would have to rewrite a large portion of the OS, as well as their own version of the Cloud to Device Messaging Service, but it's easier than starting from scratch. Messy apps that demand all kinds of random privileges could be run in some sort of Internet-access sandbox that pretends to grant low-level access.

Google+ also really, really needs to open up to teens. I'm a college student, but I still have a lot of high school friends who can't join. I can do all the inviting Google wants and carry their water, but it's unreasonable to invite people to something they can't join.

Someone named Hamid Kashfi tweeted about the suspected cert yesterday: https://twitter.com/#!/hkashfi/status/107758824810758144
Mikko Hypponen at F-Secure picked it up about two hours ago and was retweeted by wikileaks: https://twitter.com/#!/mikkohypponen/status/108234294056599553

Source Links:
https://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/108261633859649536
https://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/108251897961517056

Seems like it would also be easy resist electronically. Get a vacuum tube and make a high-powered, messy x-ray emitter and just hose the van with it. (Also, carrying an x-ray detector to ensure you have the right van would probably be courteous to innocent van drivers.)

I'm guessing the effect of an x-ray blaster on a van like this would be to wash out the image and maybe induce some concern in the operators about personal exposure. It could also get you in trouble if you just stood there and held it, but I'm sure some enterprising chap could make cheap, unattended units that one could simply embed somewhere.

I wonder - if powerful enough, could an x-ray emitter possible damage the van's sensors?

I would draw a bit of a parallel between your comments and economic planning. Which works better, a centralized planning system controlling every action and reaction, or a neural net of independent units making decisions at the smallest levels? Obviously, central economies tend to stagnate. However, a system where every room has it's own independent sensors and simple decision-makers may not fit Google's data-collection plans.

Carriers will continue to think the phone belongs to them until more customers start buying them outright. If it's subsidized, it might as well belong to the carrier.

According to this article it has a range of 3 km.