Yeah, I'm not sure what you would call the US Government nowadays. Probably more of an Oligarchy of wealthy business owners and campaign contributors telling our "Democratically Elected" Legislative bodies what bills to vote on.

A low inflation rate kind of kills the motivation to "mine" the coin and help the transaction network run, doesn't it? One of the reasons why Bitcoin (and the clones like Litecoin and Dogecoin) popular is that the early adopters could get a bunch of it while it was cheap and then watch it quickly go up in value.

I might be willing to devote about of $100 of power/time/compute cycles for a cryptocurrency that might be worth $500 a few years from now. If I knew that the currency was going to be worth $110 (best case scenario!) a few years from now, I'm not going to waste my time.

You say that like every Mom and Pop shop in the world has the resources to set up and support their own multi-million/billion dollar metropolitan fiber network.

Yes, competition will be easier with Title II, but it's not going to happen quickly. Plus, you're still going to have some rural areas where there simply isn't a large enough customer base to support multiple profitable ISP's.

The problem is that Bitcoin doesn't really work as a currency when the price is wildly swinging by over 25% in a single day.

Could you imagine being a store that only sold their goods with Bitcoin? They would have to reprice their entire inventory every hour to insure that they are making a profit on what they're selling!

Instead, most businesses that take Bitcoin have to use a service like Bitpay peg the Bitcoin transaction price to something more stable like US dollars. Even then, the Bitcoin exchange services are taking a big risk that the Bitcoin to USD price isn't going to suddenly fall. I'll bet that those services will soon need to increase their fees or offer more favorable exchange rates for themselves to stay in business.

I'm not sure how "the market" is going to work in this case. The major players in this market have already bought enough votes to pass local laws preventing competition in the regions where they operate.

At a minimum, these laws that have basically created government sponsored broadband monopolies need to be overturned to allow competition from smaller providers to occur.

Yeah, my wife got burned on that one as well.

In defense of Google, that phone is almost 3 1/2 years old now. Most manufacturers usually stop posting Android updates about 18 months after the phone is released.

That doesn't make the practice right, though. If Apple can get iOS 8.1 working on three year old iPhone 4s, Google should offer the same level of support on their flagship phones.

Which is great if you have a Google Nexus phone. If not, who knows when (or even IF) you're going to get those Android updates. After the handset manufacturer and service provider are done screwing up the Android release Google released by adding buggy bloatware, it might be six months until you can actually get it on YOUR phone.

Yeah, the reliability of the Bitcoin exchanges has a bit to be desired at the moment. Sure, it's not really the protocol's fault, but the half assed implementations that sites like MtGox used for their security have left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of Bitcoin users.

You would think that there are enough 1% ers out there who would be willing to pony up the $$$ for a supersonic private jet if one was available.

Hell... I bet that an egomaniac like Larry Ellison would even pay extra for a custom built supersonic plane that's even faster than the standard model if another tech billionaire got a hold of one first :)

Even with a Macbook, it varies on what you're doing on battery. If you're playing something like Civilization V on battery, you can drain the sucker in 90 minutes.

It's a voice search tool that seems to work a hell of a lot better than Siri.

Seriously, find a buddy with an iPhone or newer iPad and try it yourself. Do a search on Siri, and then install the Google app and try the same searches. I consistently get better results with Google.

Siri ends up doing a web search on anything but the most basic of questions, so you might as well just cut out the middle man and ask Google directly.

It doesn't help that most POS systems that I've recently used at fast food restaurants still run unpatched copies of Windows XP and often have other unpatched systems sitting on the same network switch with them.

That's a PCI compliance violation, by the way, but they never bother to fix it until they fail an audit. The store owners are just too busy slinging fries to learn about IT security or even give a damn about their systems unless they are completely down.

So, yeah, pay cash for your fast food unless you're at some big corporate run store.

It certainly didn't end music piracy, but it helped to send it back underground a bit. Limewire was a hell of a lot easier than pulling multipart file archives from a Usenet server, so non technical people could figure out how to use it.

One of the reasons that Adblock is great is that it doesn't require knowledge of things like hosts files to blacklist the hostnames of ad providers. An end user can configure this on their own without any help from a "computer guy".