The whole debate about what is actually 'free' software is hilarious and comes down to miniscule differences in dogma. It's pathetic.

That made it right to torture him, did it? Do you not see how that proves his point?

What was that in response to? My post? Because it didn't address it.

Single-issue poster somehow manages to make a thread about Dubai, about the USA and Obama. Go away.

This kind of service doesn't help at all with future planning of finances, as would what you'd expect with a mobile phone plan. Sure, these services help with the immediate case, but if I have a recurring payment of $20, say, every month, what good is that to me if XBT have just tanked yet again and I have less than half in my wallet than I had planned for? The stability is the biggest (one of the only?) problems left with bitcoin to solve before it could see wider use, and this right now is just a novelty way to pay the odd bill or two for a slim margin of customers, from a company that has made its name with similar novel marketing tactics.

Thanks for your post!

Slashdot continuing its trend of giving away free front-page adverts for trendy companies that are starting some random scheme that is vaguely tech-related, but wildly impractical (like most advertising-centric schemes are.)

Okay, we get it, everything is related to Bitcoin and we must hear about it daily. Including this patent which barely has anything to do with how Bitcoin operates on a technical or design level, other than whatever the submitter could pretend to find while glancing over the patent abstract.

I really wish the Slashdot love affair with Bitcoin would end, already.

No, you're just devaluing the word slavery by using it in that ridiculous way, because there's already a term for what you're trying to describe: vendor lock-in.

This is what Americans actually believe.

Good luck taking down an armed military with your plinkers, if they actually WANT to get rid of you. Or they could, you know, keep doing the slow-boil that they've been doing for years. That seems to be working pretty well - as you already note yourself. Why fight them when you can just make them agree with you?

Most of us wanted to move away from the whole 'needs a PC to store anything once the batteries die' thing when we ditched the Palm devices.

Okay, it's not exactly the same, but I don't like the idea of needing to bring a laptop that I otherwise simply don't need in case I'm away from home longer than the battery lasts in one go and when I'm between power points. That's just absurd to me.

I've only ever done MSP as a stop on the way to somewhere else and you pointed out in another post that I must clearly have ignored/missed an exit to the unsecured area immediately after its customs barrier and just before security. So I have to apologise for my assertions in the thread. My destination is usually Kansas - short of hopping in a Greyhound or hiring a car or something equally horrible, I have no way of making a direct flight there so it's as good as an arrival scan to me, probably why I didn't think it through properly for people that were actually stopping at MSP.