It's not a cop locating app, it's an app to suggest alternate routes of travel around congested areas. It just has a feature to show where police are, but that's not the purpose of it.

Is what the results of your study show, that there are a few hundred hardened criminals around?

Are you suggesting that their test results are incorrect?

I don't see any DRM-like behavior at all, it's just destructive scanning. Who says it's only limited to a single reproduction? Like you pointed out, sometimes destruction is the only way to really find out what something is, but once you've done that what's really stopping someone from then creating 100 copies of it?

I saw the same thing on one of Arizona's ballots, I can't remember if that was for gay marriage or legalized marijuana though. The question was something along the lines of "should the existing restrictions stay in place", so if you voted yes then you were voting against changing the law.

So instead of last year being the hottest, you're saying that there's a chance that it was only unusually hot. So it's either unusually hot, or the hottest.

If we're stating numbers though, we might as well make an effort to be accurate, right? NOAA claims 48% accuracy, and NASA claims 38% accuracy, with the difference being 0.04 degrees Celcius hotter than the next warmest years (2010 and 2005). Various satellite systems have also ranked 2014 at fourth or sixth place.

I'm speaking about the dark web. You cannot purchase products there with dollars.

I do it because I'm only one link in that chain. I'm not the guy with a bunch of BTCs wondering who I can sell them to, I'm just doing a single transaction that involves converting to the local currency before making my purchase. In this particular situation, using dollars isn't an option in the first place when BTC is the only currency accepted.

In as much as any given currency is a proxy for any other given currency, correct.

For the same reason that when I go to Switzerland I exchange my dollars for Swiss Francs. Bitcoins are the local currency where I shop.

How is it any different than the government printing dollars which make the claim that they are legal tender? Should you just take their word for it? You have a piece of paper in your pocket that you can exchange for quite a bit of food, but the paper isn't valuable. It's not magic paper, it can't cure hemorrhoids. It's just paper, with little pieces of thread and stuff. It would take several thousand pieces of it to equal the value of 1 log of firewood.

Like anything else, be it little pieces of paper or metal, or hashes and algorithms, or bottle caps, barbie doll heads, marbles, whatever; the true value of something is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. The prices on the exchanges are actual prices, that is what people are actually willing to pay. That is what a bitcoin is actually worth. Just like dollars and coins.

That being said, a lot of time needs to pass before anyone should seriously consider converting the majority of their wealth to a currency like bitcoins. If the US dollar or any other state-sponsored currency were seeing volatility like what you see with BTC then no one would be keeping their fortune there, either. The reason USD is a better currency at this point to store your money is because right now it is much more stable than BTC. That's really the only reason though.

I think you missed my point. If I want to buy $200 USD worth of goods, and I want to pay in bitcoins, I go out and buy $200 USD in bitcoins (however many BTC that works out to be at the time), I do my transaction, and that's it. It doesn't matter to me if the value of BTC goes up or down the next day. I buy them, and immediately transfer them back out. It's not a currency to hold on to considering the volatility that it sees. But its usefulness as an anonymous currency is still there, I can still go buy my BTC and transfer them out to purchase whatever I want within an hour or however long it takes the transfers to go through. If I do that, then I am immune to everything except the most extreme volatility (huge swings in under an hour).

In other words, when I'm ready to make a purchase using bitcoins it does not matter to me at all what the current value of BTC are. I have used them when they were $100 each, and I've used them when they were $1000 each. I still got what I wanted either way, the system still worked.

What idiot would invest in bitcoins once they saw the price go up to over $1000 and then crash back down? The only people who were smart about "investing" in bitcoins are the people who bought them for fractions of a cent during the first year.

Bitcoins are not an investment. They are an anonymous currency (for certain values of anonymous). Period. Just because some people try to speculate and make money trading in them does not change what their purpose is.

That's rather over-simplified, isn't it? I'm not aware of any laws which are written with the purpose of outlawing consenting adults from exchanging goods and services. It's the goods and services that are outlawed. I'm sure there's some law which is akin to outlawing specifically and knowingly providing a place for people to engage in otherwise illegal behavior.

Bitcoins have not lost any of their utility, at all. If I want to buy something that costs $200 in bitcoins, I go get $200 in bitcoins and then buy it. It doesn't matter how many bitcoins I get for $200, the system is still working exactly like it always has. If someone decides that they want to buy $1000 in bitcoins, spend a fifth of it, and save the rest for another purchase later, they might find out that they don't have enough for another purchase whenever they get around to it. The volatility of bitcoins is just proof that you shouldn't horde them, there's no reason to do that. But the system in general has lost exactly zero amount of usefulness.

Right, and no one ever made any money in the American financial system.

Check your math. The flaw exists in Android 4.3 and older. 4.4 has 39.1% share, and whatever version number version L is has 0.1%. The remainder is 4.3 and older.