You and Wikipedia are > than my old memory cells!

Are they even turning a profit at this new price point?

The Playbook does not need to make money. It needs to keep RIM in the corporate conversation long enough for them to make a more compelling argument for their existence. It is a placeholder to keep attention on their real product - the Blackberry brand name.

To make the classic car analogy, it is like when Honda started selling rebadged Isuzu Troopers (Honda Passport). They didn't do it to make money, they did it so they had a "me too!" product on their lot during the peak of the SUV wars while they scrambled to make the real product (the CR-V and then the Pilot).

Simply wrong.
One measures film's resolving power in lp/mm (or lines, but many in line pairs).
If you don't believe the wikipedia entry on photographic film perhaps Ilford's?

*viable threat of that sort

Maybe LEO, but the distance between any two birds in an orbit that high necessitates either one hell of a big bomb or so many nukes one might as well do a direct hit and invalidate the whole shielding bit.

I am unaware of any unique shielding on the GPS birds and can't fathom a viable threat against them. Perhaps there is something in the literature I've missed. I'll ask at work tomorrow.

Luckily the GPS sats are mil spec so they are pretty hardened (primarily due to the threat of atmospheric nuke detonations).

The GPS birds are 12,645 miles up. From that distance the difference between an atmospheric detonation and a surface one is just about nil.

I can't comment on the rest of your post, but if it is as poorly backed as that comment your fears are largely unwarranted.

This was true well into the 90's, but today the vast majority of malware is written for monetary gain.

+1

+1BTC would be more appropriate

+5 BTC at current exchange rates, amIright?

The problem which lead up to the current 'crisis' is perfectly illustrated through both the arguments of the right and the left as exemplified in this very subthread.

The cause, and solution for, the USA's massive debt load is quite complex and intertwined. Yet all one hears is bullshit simplistic answers which, while appealing to their respective bases, utterly fail to address the problem.

The recent ascension of the Tea Party is a predictable reactionary movement to the fact the world is fucking complex, and only becoming more so. The fact a large percentage of the citizenry is charmed by someone saying "The world is black and white, and here's what I'm going to do" is to be expected. My only fear is a similar movement arises on the left. That said so long as the pendulum is swung in this direction of false monochromatic pandering there will be no long-term solution. The pendulum will swing back, those who rise to power by the sword of simple answers die by the sword of simple answers. When one's charm is "yes" / "no"s it's hard to defend failed decisions with "maybe"s.

It doesn't matter if the metaphorical glass-maker paid the destructor or not. The point of the metaphor is that wealth was destroyed (windows) to create economic movement and how that is a zero-sum (in simplified terms) game.

In the lulz-sec scenario arguably no wealth is destroyed, therefore it is not a zero-sum game.

I agree with everything you said just above, but what's that business you were trying to say about a tornado?

This isn't the broken window fallacy. Nobody is trying to boost the economy by breaking perfectly good things.

Rubbish. The systems they are targeting are working fine. They are breaking perfectly working things, thus demonstrating that they are BREAKABLE. That's irrelevant. In the broken window fallacy the windows are breakable too.

Wrong.

If the systems they are targeting are breakable they are not working fine.

A window can be breakable and still perform its primary mission. The breakability of the window has nothing to do with the point of the story.

An authentication server can not be susceptible to such attacks while still be considered performing its primary mission.

You just made the broken window fallacy yourself!

The fallacy isn't that a person (instead of a force of nature) performed the damage, but rather that money is diverted into replacing perfectly functional things.

A tornado is never good for the economy, for while it may divert money towards the construction industry it has a net negative impact on total wealth.

I'm not sure why a brokerage is better.

OP isn't saying a brokerage is better, OP is saying that MtGox and the other exchanges were acting as exchange and brokerages.

Customers are better served when exchange and brokerage are separated and it's a structural weakness of BiitCoin that no method of doing a balanceless exchange appears possible, thus exchange and brokerage functions must be joined.

For me the centerpiece of the OS is the file manager and the tools to do my tasks

This is an argument against the browser as OS and gets +4 insightful? The mind boggles.

1 - File manager as centerpiece of OS:
A - A file manager is an app (of my choosing) which runs on top of my OS.
B - As we have already seen browser (IE / Konqueror) is hard to distinguish from a file manager (Explorer / Konqueror) and so if we accept your argument that the file manager is the centerpiece of an OS there is evidence aplenty that a browser is said centerpiece.

2 - "The tools to do my tasks" as co-centerpiece of an OS.
If ever there was a classic definition of "applications" it was "the tools to do my tasks". The OS is the tool to do the application's tasks. If we're going to zoom out and take such a broad view of what an OS is (it sounds to me like you're describing a desktop environment ) how are current browsers not inches away from that already?

We know the cloud is not 100% reliable

Where in the concept of "browser as OS" is "no off-line content" made explicit?

Because I mined hundreds of them over a year ago (CPU, not GPU mining) when BTC was nothing more than a thought experiment.

I had stopped playing with the system around August of last year and it wasn't until I heard about the price growing past $8 a BTC on NPR that I remembered I had a shit ton of them by current standards.

So I started moving them out through various exchanges, spreading my exposure risk to bad actors and fraud while hedging my bets and holding on to some.