I live in central Europe and my smart-phone has a pre-paid card with a 1GB data option enabled for 10 EUR (~14 USD) a month.

That's by far enough for e-mail chat and the occasional map. And I can get rid of it anytime I want (just don't have to extend it for the next month).

I'm always fascinated to hear the comparison from the new world.

My best guess is, that this will trigger contracts that say: "supplier vows to abide by IP laws". The vendor that buys products from the supplier then just claims they didn't know about it (they really don't care). Then they testify (truthfully) that they did their due diligence and acted in good faith.

How do you want to sue someone when they act in good faith and have no knowings of what the supplier on the other half of the word is breaking the contract? Do you want to make supplier audits mandatory? Don't be ridiculous.

And if a law is passed that enables the suing of the companies when someone exposed the supplier, this opens a whole can of post factum liability worms.

The other thing is, that China is only vocal about IP laws, but the industry mostly depends on shallow enforcement. So I really doubt that it will be easy to expose suppliers if it has bad consequences for Chinese companies.

You seem to miss the point. Avoiding run-away inflation is exactly the point of gold backed legal tender. They would have to exchange it for external affairs, but that would be their smallest problem.

The U.S. treasury and central bank would never allow this to happen + it's illegal.

Only if you believe in a deterministic universe. Otherwise you get pretty good results with TRNG's and quantum mechanics.

http://www.random.org/randomness/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography

Shut up, for crying out loud. You work under the assumption that your system stays uncompromised.

In security you should work under the assumption that your hash files get compromised, konws the hashes, the salt and the algorithm.

That's why stuff like bcrypt was developed. It's addressing this situation by making brute force hash lookups unfeasable.

Please read a crypto 101 book before posting next time, this really hurts to read.

Well, that's only because we collectively managed to very efficiently stick the shit to the catapult and someone turned on the fan this week.

It's funny, most of the stuff you have in your pocket is not that much different. You bring it to a bank and it just becomes a bunch of numbers on your credit account backed by nothing. Banks and the goverment basically play the same game, with the difference that they get away with it.

Well, if I'd plan a revolution, I'd set up a few mobile satellite up-links and an ad-hock WiFi network through the major cities, establishing communication and organization cells with instructions how to operate them (protocol).

But then again, a revolution is mostly a pretty messy, so they were probably preoccupied with other things, like wild rage and stuff.

Oh come on people, please don't label every possible action "theft".

Sony did not steal anything of you, instead they commited "FRAUD". They advertised the costumers features of their product, and removed them afterwards in fairly illegal ways, that's a breach of contract (assuming that most of that small print babling nobody reads is invalid) and as such fraud.

Trucks are big, slow and smelly. The diagrams show that cars follow a lead truck close by. I really doubt this will be a success.

Netflix only servers 300 million users max. (U.S. residents only). The Internet is actually much larger (global), so it would not make that much difference.

Google on the other hand does global business, so they can and probably will make a dent if they want to. And it seems they want.

I don't think Microsoft has to worry all that much about this. The PS3 is interesting because of the Cell broadband engine and as such, has a lot of potential. It's also quite reliable. The XBox 360 has very average hardware with high failure rates, and therefore has little attraction to be opened. The WII was broken long ago, as it only has marginal security measures.

Don't you worry, one of these days, someone will write a full 386 emulator in JavaScript bringing the full Web 2.0 fidelity to your lawn.

And if you have an especially powerful rig, you'll even be able to use the 'turbo' button.

You forget that not everyone is a basement dweller. Split screen and LAN games are/were generally a nice social activity. Get a few friends, a few beers and make a fun evening in one place.

You can't really replicate that with on-line play and team speak.

Granted, those have their place too, and there are also the days you don't really want to have people around. Still, both have their advantages. Seeing that socializing in this form dies out just fastens our zombification as a society.

Not that complaining would help, so I don't. Just making an observation.

The langpop site has quite a good set of charts, including Google Code and Freshmeat: http://langpop.com/

Did not found any up to date stats on sourceforge, the only statistic circling around is very dated (2006): http://wismuth.com/lang/languages.html