It's not a scam, but it's not clear what it is.

The coins are behaving like a genuine new commodity with some amazing properties.

It's excellent for moving money between countries. It's stunningly good for microtransactions. It's very difficult to control companies which accept it. Those three properties alone give it a real value.

As a transactional currency, you could calculate a fundamental value as the volume of bitcoins in flux over a 45 minute interval. I.e., if I want to spend $10 on an e-book on the other side of the world, it takes 15 minutes for me to buy the coins, 15 minutes to transfer the coins and 15 minutes for the recipient to sell the coins. Those $10 are in the system and staying in the system for that period of time.

For microtransactions, you can buy objects or be paid for objects in tiny fractions of currency. This means you can charge for reading articles or watching programs without all the money going to the credit card companies or having to pay for a monthly subscription. Nothing else does this and it increases the volume of transactions, or currency in the system.

It can't be interfered with easily, so accounts which could normally be frozen could be stashed in Bitcoins and still retrieved anywhere in the world.

That stuff alone gives the coins *real* value. How much of hte $1000 valuation is "real" is unknown, but the rise from $0 to $1 is far more interesting than the rise from $1 to $1000. The fact that somebody might have owned it once at $1 doesn't matter. The coins aren't real and it's not clear what exactly is driving the market for them.

The "accounts" analogy doesn't go very far when you can create and empty a bitcoin wallet with no cost and no penalty. There are "mixing" services which take the bitcoins from multiple sources and redistribute them.

Although the mixing service seems to be analogous to going to a back alley and meeting with a dozen shady guys, all with suitcases full of money and traced serial numbers on their bills, dropping your $100k into a trash bin with all the other guys's $100k, where some guy then takes the bin into a room in the back, shuffles the money around and hopefully gives it back to you.

Tracing back these kinds of laundered coins could be very difficult, but it only seems to mask the person hiding the transaction in plausible deniability. It seems clear they're hiding something, but the law doesn't (fortunately) permit *that* to be enough to prosecute them for anything.

But with anti money laundering measures, pure mixing services are risky, transactions could be traced back through the blockchain until the police ask "so... where *did* this $200 worth of BTC come from if you didn't get it from selling crack on the Silk Road?" which I think would force you to admit to using a mixing service, which may be, or very soon be illegal.

So what plausibly legitimate business takes money from thousands of people and spreads money to thousands of others, while taking a cut for the house? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=162807.msg1713104#msg1713104

"If Microsoft is forced to reveal in public which patents are being violated and how, it would allow the Linux community to evaluate that information and find prior art where it exists or find ways to make linux not violate the patent (e.g. kernel option to disable the relavent code or rewrite the code to not violate) and generally make it harder for MS)"

It goes a step further. The community *must* circumvent or overturn the patent because the GPL doesn't give the option of distributing patent-encumbured technologies in the code.

You can sue all you like, but you can't make any money from it. The best you can hope for is killing the technology.

Both might work.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and eternal vigilance is expensive.

This needs go go beyond just overruling Bell's actions, there needs to be a serious penalty.

" his brain had unusual features which may have provided certain advantages"

Or... his life revolved around unusual studies which caused his brain to respond by developing the corpos callosum?

This reeks of the same kind of misandrist behavior that we saw with the Adria Richards situation. A situation where 'sexual jokes are fine if your a woman, but if you have a penis, sexual jokes make you evil'.

I agree with your position about Adria Richards, but in her case, the jokes weren't about women, they were about penises and sex. She just assumed they were about women, and for whatever reason, asserted that they were degrading to women.

In this case, the jokes *were* about women, and they weren't some guys in the back of the room talking to eachother, they were two guys on the stage. They were selling an app which encourages voyeurism and harassment. It should have been weeded out by the conference before it reached the stage.

I'm not sure this would even be okay for a porn conference... the voyeur and harassment aspects are... really bad.

Created my account in January 2010, used it for a lot of stuff.

Single sign-on turns into single point of failure... again.

I'm sure as hell not going to use Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook or whomever for single sign on. I have enough trouble trying to prevent people from sucking me into Google+ and keeping my Youtube account separate from my Gmail account. LinkedIn and Facebook already want to get into my email to "build my social network" further. None of these are trustworthy companies.

I guess I'm going to have to add a dozen more passwords to my password database.

I mean, as opposed to just charging them with sedition and publishing it in the state owned papers as such.

You could argue that e.g. Fox calling Snowden a traitor is the same, but you won't be arrested for publicly disagreeing with Fox and calling it crap journalism.

My point is not that I agree with the actions of the U.S. I think they're violating their own constitution and playing a very unethical hand to the international community, but that comparisions of the U.S. to a police state do more to discredit a person's argument than to call people to action.

North Korea and Nazi Germany are/were military dictatorships. In a military dictatorship, there's no pretense of due process. There is one leader and if you cross them, you suffer the consequences. East Germany was very much a police state, but one could argue that it was under the control of the USSR and not that unique an example.

I think categorically denying that the U.S. is a police state is dangerous. Something very unhealthy is happening in the U.S.. People don't even feel free to talk openly about it anymore. Names are being taken down via social media and citizens are being secretly spied upon without due process. The pretense of due process is still there. Guantanamo is considered "different" and the DHS operates in a space which is also "an exception". The government still feels it needs to explain its actions to the media.

I thoroughly agree, current generation wind and solar aren't quite ready to replace other technologies. Nuclear is probably the best solution we have at the moment.

It would be nice to see a future with improved power storage technology for wind and solar. Nuclear could handle a large chunk of the grid's base load, while hydroelectric, wind, solar and their stored power could be used to handle shifts in demand.

It would also be nice to see more courage in developing nuclear systems, it's a mystery to me why Thorium isn't being developed, and why we can put so much security into waste, but not consider facilities which can generate power from the waste.

"“He was an authorized air gap,” said an intelligence official

I think they were talking to the cafeteria workers.

It amazes me the lack of logic. It seems consistent that when A -> B -> C, people get lost somewhere between A and B, policticians latch onto "Let's talk about 'A'", while anyone who starts to talk about B gets shouted down as some kind of egghead.

If climate models are correct, a leveling off or small reduction in emissions won't do anything to help

That's a very big "if", based on a very black and white interpretation of reporters sensationalist reporting on science, and a stretch on "won't do anything". At best, I would say "If climate models are correct, a leveling off or small reduction in emissions may have very little effect"

While economic incentives can help move things in certain directions, this won't really do that much and mostly will serve to enrich those that play the exchanges (see Wall Street).

This blows my mind. THE WORLD CONSUPTION OF FOSSIL FUELS IS BUILT ON ECONOMICS. people don't burn fossil fuels because it's fun, they burn them because they need to burn them to participate in their local economies. Shifting economic incentives could be all that's needed to make an enormous long term difference.

... climate change advocates ...

There is no such thing. Nobody is advocating climate change, except maybe people planning the North West passage.

AGW, Anthroprogenic Global Warming. The theory that global temperatures are being altered by humans.

"cap and trade" your usage, you don't actually have to decrease the amount you use...

Cap and trade is economics. If you don't understand it, just stop talking about it. The free market sets the price on emissions. Increasing the price of emissions means that an incentive is created to reduce your emissions.

Cap and trade acts as a counterbalance to the problem that environmental controls cost money. The companies with the greatest energy efficiency are naturally penalized in the current economy. The controls cost more than the energy savings, so those without the controls outcompete in the market.

You can legislate local controls on emissions, but that affects your international competitiveness. China doesn't need to implement environmental controls, so they burn the fuel faster, negating any carbon emissions benefit that your local controls had in the first place.

Maybe crap in a bucket and dump it outside...

The problem with your crap in a bucket strawman is that climate science isn't like house repair. If you extend your analogy, we don't have other houses to compare ours with. Nobody's built a house before. Nobody's knocked down a house before. Only a handful of people have stepped on the lawn of the house, and nobody's sure if there are any other houses anywhere that we could live in. Also, all your food is grown inside your house, your water is contained inside your house, we're decades from figuring out how to put our crap in a bucket to throw our crap outside. Our windows don't open, we've got an air quality issue, and there are 6 billion people inside.

Do people mod this stuff up just because it suits their political opinions?

- 5% know somebody who can read code; - 30% know somebody who knows somebody who can read code; - ... - 100% know a newspaper who would publish the story if a single expert read the source code and discovered there is snooping hidden in it (by then a host of other experts can simply confirm this fact)

Knowing how to "code" isn't enough, you need to study the codebase. A tiny fraction of those who know how to code have studied the mailpile codebase enough to catch a backdoor. I would say, practially speaking... 0 outside the core developers.

Backdoors or snooping are best hidden with plausible deniability. Even if you discover one, it won't be obvious that it was intentional, it will be no more newsworthy than a typical vulnerability report.