salient

> They're suppose to be making money on the voice/data usage for 2 years

And they will! You can throw your AT&T sim away and never touch it again. But you will still pay them the $70 a month or whatever you were paying them before, unless you actually break the contract with them and pay the ETF. AT&T doesn't lose in either situation.

I think you're confusing 2 issues here:

1) unlocking the phone

2) killing the contract with AT&T

Until now to "unlock your phone", you had to kill your contract with AT&T, and then move over to T-Mobile. But now you'll be able to unlock the phone for free - while maintaining the contract with AT&T - and still be able to use T-mobile. So you'll be paying both contracts (if for some reason you want to use both - like say you have family on AT&T's network, etc).

This is very common in Europe. People use 2 networks on the same phone all the time, by switching the SIMs. And I think in Asia, too, because in both these regions dual-SIM phones are on the rise.

How exactly? You're still in a 2 year contract. Whether you're using T-mobile's SIM or not is completely irrelevant. You signed a 2 year contract with AT&T and you're paying them every last time until that period expires. Unlocking the phone changes nothing.

Unless, you actually interrupt the contract with AT&T, but in that case it's not much different than it is today, and you just pay the ETF and you're on your merry way.

Hopefully she sets up a system so only a tiny fraction of those 600,000 backlogged patents get accepted by USPTO employees, while the others get discarded as the useless patents that they are. Then USPTO will have time to pass the patents that really matter, right on schedule, too.

So what's the difference between the PG - suitable for everyone, mode, and "I don't want any online protection"?

You'd think they are one and the same thing, but it doesn't sound like it. The PG stuff is still filtered? Because if that's the case, I fear most people will only choose one of the 3 main modes, but will still get their Internet filtered (say for stuff like TPB, or Snowden leaks, or whatever).

GPU mining is still not as decentralized, as basically only high-end PC gamers (with their own default cards) and the people specifically buying GPUs for mining will have a shot at it.

CPU-only mining would be a lot more decentralized, if such a thing is even possible.

The alternative was a Facebook Page, probably, so...

I think it will fail, hard - just like Facebook Poke did. And that was when Snapchat was very, very early. Now it has a ton of momentum behind it, and this is hopeless.

I guess it was chosen to "streamline" the process of assigning a patent to someone (first come, first served). Unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean it's a better process, because now, as expected, the trolls (or corporations with a lot of money for filing dumb patents) will be the ones to take advantage the most from it.

I don't really buy that argument. Yes, central banks can print more money, but it's not like they can print 30 percent of the existing money within a year to compensate for the 30 percent rise in demand for the dollar. But again, I think huge volumes and the law of numbers play a big role here, because I don't think it's possible to see a 30 percent rise in dollar demand within a year anymore, while that's very possible with Bitcoin (for now).

I guess my point was that rather than have Bitcoin grow 3x within a month because of some big news, then crash to 2x of its height, and then grow back "slowly" to where it was within another 1-3 months, it could just grow more smoothly to begin with, and even if there were some big news in a row, there could be a lot of people betting against it and having it grow perhaps only 50 percent overall that month, and then another 50 percent the next month, or whatever.

Slower rises, and no (big) crashes.

"In the name of the People, shut down this facility!"

Well, that sounds familiar. It seems the more governments change over the decades, the more they stay the same.

Wouldn't this ultimately help stabilize the price of Bitcoin, in part because perhaps Bitcoin bubbles wouldn't reach such tall heights anymore, if a lot more people can bet against them?

I think besides much bigger volume and liquidity (still the main reasons for stability), this is probably one of the reasons why other currencies are so stable, because there's a lot of back and forth between traders - rather than everyone buying and buying and buying, until it comes crashing down hard.

I'm glad all of this happened before the new EU privacy law passed, too, because all of these revelations should've put a permanent stop on US companies' lobbying for weaker privacy in EU, and it may even add some new stronger protections by the time it gets voted on, because of this. If the data retention one falls, too, even better.

This is why the start-up environment sucks in Europe. It seems so (relatively) easy to get $20 million in US as a start-up, while it seems almost impossible to get that kind of money in Europe from an investor, which is why there are so many "winner takes all" companies from US and not from other places.

This happens at a time when Bitstamp is several times bigger than Coinbase, also growing fast, and is covering both EU and US. Yet, because of this sort of funding (and probably more later), there will probably be yet again a US company dominating the scene.

In a post-Snowden relevations time, I'm not very eager to continue using US services, but the environment seems to be so harsh for non-US companies that want to be global companies, and they basically have to grow themselves into global companies only through bootstrapping (the vast majority of them, I'm sure there are a few exceptions).

Can you add Bitstamp growth, too?

By the way, just a couple of thousand signatures needed for ECPA reform petition, and today is the last day (might be just hours, not sure):

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reform-ecpa-tell-g...

I disagree. The government should only spy on "targets" not on "everyone in order to find targets". Otherwise, might as well let them go through your home at will, to find criminals. Not so coincidentally, NSA already thinks the 4th amendment doesn't amount to much, and it's only a matter of time before they collect data from your smart TVs or Xbox Ones and whatnot, if they aren't already.

If you want smaller phone and with more battery life get the Moto X. If you want a phone that always receives the latest version of Android first and a 1080p screen get the Nexus 5.

Do you get searched by the TSA even when you're using the US airport as a hub, and not visiting US? Because I was already thinking of avoiding US as a hub if possible, but I wasn't sure if it was necessary or not.

"Remember when the administration said X? They lied." - seems to be happening quite often.

The almost funny thing is that at the time they also say they wouldn't have the authority to do that anyway, but when they get caught doing it, they always try to turn it around and say "but of course it's legal - and it's necessary anyway (implying that it doesn't really matter if it's legal or not)!"

And yeah, it's getting a little ridiculous how everytime one more of the leaks is unveiled, nobody is punished - in any way.

$30 a month if you opt out of not wanting AT&T to spy on your traffic? Surely that's unconstitutional/illegal and worthy of a class action lawsuit?

Will that data be as "secure" from the US government as their banking information is these days?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/11/us-tax-switzerland...

Also, remember when Switzerland helped the US government by banning Assange's account? So much for having a "strong reputation" in data protection.

http://mashable.com/2010/12/06/wikileaks-switzerland/

If they are really serious about this, good on them. But one should approach them with a little skepticism given their not so flawless track record.

Google has been warned plenty of times about this. They just don't care. They're instead making it ever easier to file mass bogus takedowns to more and more channels at once to appease Big Content.

And in Obama's case, that turned out to be extremely premature. So learn from history? Then again didn't Time give this award to Hitler, too? So yeah, they don't exactly have a good record of learning from history.

I figured they wouldn't give it to Snowden. They're too scared/docile to do such a thing. They gave it to Zuckerberg - in 2011 (why that year?!) - instead of Assange, too, so whatever. To me Time POY is useless.

It doesn't really matter if you're "interesting" or not. They're using keyword filters anyway, so if you don't encrypt your stuff, and say something that they consider suspicious, you'll probably show up in their alert system anyway. Welcome to the surveillance state and self-censorship. I'd say it's worse to not have your data encrypted.

Relevant:

http://betanews.com/2013/12/09/tech-giants-surveillance-refo...

As long as these companies build the best tracking engines the world has ever seen, that can identify anyone and everything they're doing, it's just a matter of time before governments get their hands on that data, legally or illegally. It's just too tempting to pass.

If I were Google I'd start thinking long and hard about how to solve this problem, and try to make money by actually being on the user's side when it comes to privacy, not against them. Google will ultimately fail if their goals aren't aligned with those of the users anymore.

Not lawsuits, patent extortion. If only there were actual lawsuits, but I don't think they've won anything from actual lawsuits. They just pressured companies into giving them money.

No access to the Play Store, which makes the whole thing pointless. It really is like starting from scratch.