I've worked on a ton of enterprise projects and never once did a customer say that they would even consider SQLServer. It's all Oracle/DB2 in this space. You can list a series of new technologies, but frankly Sharepoint is SCM/Wiki, Lync is useless outside of a MS centric enterprise, and SQL Server is a cheaper also-ran enterprise DB. Without its requirements for exchange/(sharepoint? not sure if it uses SQLS backends), and its trivially simple setup, SQL server sales would be significantly smaller.

References cited please before espousing something so ridiculous. By what measure would you call economist's predictions a failure? That the economy was adjusted by a range of basis points?

That said, the world is a very complicated organism, and predicting the economy has much in common with predicting the weather. We may not have an exact model of what the weather will be like tomorrow, but they understand the general patterns which get pretty darn close. Are they always 'right' in their predictions? No, does that invalidate the science because someone disagrees with your opinion? Probably not.

Who's to 'issue new currency' when this one fails? Who is there to say, yeah we'll honour your now very useless bitcoins with this brand new value currency exactly?

Plus, why in the world would any Bitcoins become more valuable because of scarcity? A bitcoin is a bitcoin. Why would it intrinsically change value if there were 100 or 10,000,000 in the system? There's absolutely nothing important about a bitcoin's value in regards to the circulation, because by definition bitcoins aren't linked to anything in the real world. Sure, if I 'printed' a trillion bitcoins and handed them out like candy, the value of the currency would drop, but that first requires the hand out.

"Gift Cards (Amazon/Apple/Steam/Google/etc) ... (Canadian Tire Money)"
All of these are pegged directly to real gov. currencies and hence are legislated to be honoured as an obligation for cash exchange within the bounds of their own rules. There may be terms on maintaining balance/etc, but it's illegal to withhold payment if in good standing. That's what makes these things a currency, and that is also what makes these tax free (gov's don't double dip by charging tax to 'purchase' the item), though if you acrue value from a $50 gift point card to purchase a $100 item, you're obligated to pay tax on the full $100 purchase.

"Then there's non-traditional currency, like WoW Gold."
WoW gold is strictly not a currency by definition because there is no entity giving an obligation to exchange it into a real world currency. Currencies require both in/out to fall into most nations' purview. This works very shakily especially if you look at something like Pachinko, which uses an intermediary step as the currency transformation back into Yen.

I think you highly underestimate a government's drive to get paid. If any form of government is running smoothly, it'll be the tax man.

Motive behind the post? Seriously? Someone's unhappy that people are making money (well, at least PAPER money until its sold), and they may like me hate the fact that people -could- make money for doing essentially having big balls and doing nothing valuable to society.. darn. What's to hate about that? When the New York cow boys flushed your retirement plan down the drain, were you pissed off or not? I think there's good reason to be bearish in abscess greed.

Pfft, call me back when it hits 3 million.

Premise #1 relies on a bank that is better at security than you are a target. Since these outfits are 0% legislated at this point, I wouldn't put credence on their assurance that your money is safe there. Remeber, if one bank gets ripped off and stolen, there is literally nothing that they can do to get your money back. Hope you're enjoying the ride.

Who said anything about client-side? Nod.js is server side JS, which IMHO is pretty dumb unless you're doing it for user front facing DSL's (which its awesome for).

Torchlight 2 had dreadfully broken multi-player. I tried with 3 friends several times to much comical and pathetic consequences. They talk about sync in this game, TL2 was Always out of sync (even game hosts were out of sync!)

I don't see white items or even blues at all unless I hit ALT, so maybe you should check the options... it may also affected based on the level you're at.

I don't see this type of shit ever. Examples please.

And nothing of value was lost.

Fair for most points, but what if you were able to do polarized passive lens 3D on home screens (like they do in theatres). Would that be enough to convince you of watching 3D movies at home? I'm not big in 3D, but there are some movies where is was slightly more immersive than traditional watching, and probably worth the effort if the extra cost was mostly small.

I had enough problems sending 2460x1440 through DVI that I don't have much faith that any old HDMI output implementation will work fine. Outside that, the super high res screens are only relevant on static images anyways. You may be able to see the crisp deliciousness of sill images, but once things start moving, your ability to distinctly identify the details significantly decreases. The human eye can only absorb so much at one time. I think I'd prefer the visuals to look more like natural lighting (like adapting to the area in which it was presented) as a big potential for new displays in the future.