Unoeufisenough

There is also a big difference between "some deflation" and run-away thousand percent exponential deflation. The Austrians may not have been contemplating the later. Or not have been contemplating that any sober person would propose a currency scheme with that as a fundamental feature throughout it's adoption phase.

A thousand times this. A currency that is designed to be radically unstable in value is not a currency. Out of control deflation is just as bad as out of control inflation.

Bcoin is nothing but a bunch of runaway tulip bulbs. Have fun if you want to buy on the way up and... sell in time, woe to you if don't.

Mars is pretty far, but 240 days doesn't sound so bad. In the age of explorers, the first human sailors to circumnavigate the earth took 4 years to do it. A handful of them even survived the journey!

Flawless, zero-latency voice recognition under those conditions is rather implausible. Otherwise though, an impressive vision of the promise of AR.

For all the doubters here, notice the enormous number of comments generated already. Even though we are (rightly) scared about some of the aspects of glass and ubiquitous AR, we sure are collectively fascinated by the idea.

I heard it first originally as an engineering joke. And also horses instead of cows.

You know you're an engineer when: You'll assume a horse is spherical in order to make a math easier.

Funnier with horses. Horses are less spherical. They way they industrially force feed and force breed cows these days, spherical is actually not that ironic an approximation to make. More sad than funny.

Such aggressive prosecution has a lot do with the elected nature of sheriffs and DA's, a peculiarity of the US system. The political nature of enforcement and prosecution seems to change incentives towards maximizing conviction rates and publicity of high-profile convictions... sometimes it would seem at the expense or beyond what would be optimal for society or the crime.

You don't integrate the game hardware into the device. It's relatively easy for the cableco to give you fast, low ping bandwidth to a local cable switch within their network. That's where you put the game hardware. You create a new gaming platform and virtualize the console to a cluster hosted by the cableco. This game-rendering cluster is scalable, upgradeable and on demand. You don't need to distribute a lot of expensive, loss-leadin, power-hungry silicon to every house - that ends up sitting idle 90% of the day.

The vector is the same as for QR codes, paste a different tag overtop of a legitimate tag that takes the user to a URI with a browser or other application exploit. Or physical world version of phishing. Again it is the application that is the root of the vulnerability. NFC would be no worse than a QR code or even a malicious URL printed in plain english on a poster.

The only unique theoretical option would be to hack a very highpowered antenna and transmitter to try and pick up blast out RFID-compatible signals to/from the very weak NFC radios of handsets from further away.

Actually most (depending on the card, the great majority) of those fees end up going right back to the cardholder. Those fees are what pays for all those airline points, cash-back discounts, guarantees and liability protections, purchase insurance etc.

Another way of thinking about credit cards is a way that a large groups of customers are able to band together to collectively demand discounts, rewards and other valuable protections from merchants in exchange for their business.

The banks compete amongst themselves to win your business as a cardholder by trying to negotiate higher discounts from merchants. (the fees paid by merchants are called MDR or merchant discount rate).

Exactly. This is the point I am trying to make.

@moonchrome is right.

One of the world's large credit card networks processes on the order half a trillion dollars in a typical 30 day period. So bitcoin has a way to go yet before it's volume is significant compared to other ubiquitous electronic payment methods.

Consider that they need to grow by a great many orders of magnitude to become globally economically significant, yet consider that the supply of bitcoins is relatively fixed.

How smoothly do you think that is going to work?

If you believe in the future bitcoins, you also have to believe that their value will have to eventually sky rocket by several orders of magnitude. If you believe this you should hoard every bitcoin.

So if you actually believe in bitcoins, why would you ever spend one?

If you don't believe in bitcoins, why would you ever accept one?

do you see the problem yet?

It's not about consumer protection. That's just a smoke screen. It's entirely about government revenue. Municipal taxes, sales taxes and government fees. Hotels and taxis and the like have to pay them and AirBnB and private rental models typically don't. By disrupting these models, these new services cut off revenues to cities and make it harder to justify the high taxes they milk the traditional businesses and tourists for. And cities are broke these days. And guess what, local voters also love (whether they realize it or not) the idea of raising taxes on out-of-towners instead of themselves whenever possible.

Is storing energy against the rules? for example pedaling for an hour or two to store up say mechanical energy in a flywheel, spring tension, hydraulic pressure or other means then just put the rotors in gear to lift off?

I also can recommend a MUCH better way to input text into your apple device that works today. It looks a lot more like this: http://www.apple.com/macbookair/