PayPal and Facebook broke those laws for a long time too. The only difference between Bitcoin and PayPal is that "nobody owns" Bitcoin, do it can't claim the government is damaging business.

That's HFT, or at least the principal. Economically we allow HFT because each of your trades will be with somebody that needs to move bitcoins. That actually helps the system because they don't have to wait when they need to exchange. Get enough people doing it and it prevents big swings when big spenders try breaking things.

Well in the STRICT letters on the page it says people have a right to "arms" it says nothing about fingers or hands!!! (Just like "arms" means guns and only guns, but not knives, nunchuks, or daggers) So crazy people can't have FEET! Then they can't go far.

That's not entirely correct, but the point stands. Bitcoin is modeled after a "perfect" Gold Standard. Under a Gold Standard, $1 earned NOW is still $1 later. Inflation or deflation is caused by changing the AMOUNT of goods and services per gold coin. So when guys like Forbes say Bitcoin makes no sense, they don't UNDERSTAND what the Gold Standard is either.

The main difference is that Bitcoin should never allow fractional reserve banking... Or loaning more money than YOU OWN NOW. Under the Gold Standard, you still had inflation, just more slowly. We stopped being on the Gold standard because there were 3-4x the amount of TRANSACTION occurring than all the Gold Available. Bitcoin requires every transaction to "add up" so a Bitcoin NOW is worth MORE goods or services later when more people use bitcoins.

Bitcoin is probably hated by bankers, because modern "usury=profits=inflation" doesn't work. In our current system, If you keep money, they just make more, nobody has to negotiate with you to get the money, YOUR DOLLAR NOW just gets devalued when the bank loans it out multiple times for profit.

I think this is really the break point for the bigger guys like IBM. That's why it's discussed now.

The horse is long out if the barn. For companies like IBM they have moved "outsourcing" in India to being just like an office across the country. IBM has basically bet the company on US sales forces selling Indian labor. You get a "US contact" for the first few months, but all the work is done by Indians.

I guess if you can admin your server room from your bed at 3am (and still work at 8am) your company can just pay an Indian guy to be awake at 3am and don't need you. The REAL money is in Project Management... Which quite ironically is not part of the MBA track-- to BUILD NEW THINGS? Of course Project Management is the skill of making yourself replaceable.. So the fact IT has embraced it is really going to bite us in the ass.

I would agree the Bitcoin market is irrational, but the MINING operation has value in that Bitcoin mining is what authenticates the transactions and keeps the currency in circulation. Bitcoin mining also serves as an accountant and auditor of the marketplace.. Passing to a number of servers the code that tracks transactions. So there is "inate" value to running a Bitcoin mining operation because Bitcoin customers NEED IT. On fact there is a mechanism to shift the servers from "free mining" to "paid accounting" (with a user paying a transaction fee based on processong time) as new bitcoins run out in 70 more years.

As people build super fast chips NOW to mine, they reduce the electric cost so when the market moves to transaction fees, prices will be very low.

I agree the market is crazy right now. Although basing a discussion on news articles is like basing the housing bubble on house flipping shows. But like the housing bubble, there are real winners.. While all the house flippers and bankers were high on freshly inked mortgage fumes, HOME DEPOT (and buddies) made out like bandits selling excess numbers of tools and supplies to all the people that failed at flipping, or simply wanted to play by "adding value" with home projects. The Bitcoin miners provide a chance and money to do interesting Maths in open source software normally reserved for "HDT Quants" in Wall Street basements. Having an open source problem helps chip makers learn to build specialized chips that would normally not be seen by the public.

So like all "Free Market" activities it provides value, opportunity, and/or recreation even if it shut down tomorrow.

It's no more irrational than the price of Crude Oil, or Comic Books.... In fact Bitcoin is designed so a constant flow of new coins enter the system daily. So if people were rational, 100 people could mine the bitcoins daily and it would be just fine.

Bitcoin obviously models the REAL markets and was created as a math geek/financial conservative joke on EVERYBODY. It models BEHAVIORS. Like the mortgage bubble, or HFT perfectly... It shows how ABSURD many of the things we allow bankers and investors to do every day really are. As a math game, its worth looking at just for that alone.

Because the supply of bit coins is constant per unit time no matter how many people mine them. So if 100 people mined the numbers, it would only take 100 computers. Except CAPITALISM with puny minds cannot handle such a scheme. So people will spend crazy money to get their 10 bit coins just a little sooner than somebody else. This is no more logical than gold mining... Have you seen the show for Mining Alaskan gold flakes? It's equally as wasteful.

Or how about Wall Street High Frequency Trading? HFT is almost EXACTLY like mining bit coins... And considerably more money is spent versus if people just traded their stocks one time per day and used pen and paper.

The replacement Wii-only compatible hardware coming only plays Wii games. It's a Wii-lite with no online component, that is the motivation for canceling the Wii services. Otherwise, they could have just left them running as "lite" versions of the data they push to Wii U.

You just explained why people don't understand that Apple revolutionized tablets as much as Palm before them. That Microsoft's "solution" for having Office on Metro was just an Icon to open a normal desktop shows that they DON'T UNDERSTAND TABLETS. We already had that... And customers REJECTED desktop GUI metaphors on a finger-based device... Microsoft added nothing of value to the RT version of Office that the XP version from 2002 didn't have.

Microsoft's entire Office Product is tied to a giant GUI kit, right down to the engine that renders a document on a page.. Microsoft has known since Dot Net (more than 5 years) that they needed to REFACTOR Office to run on leaner machines with leaner APIs and lower hardware requirements. But they failed to execute. We EXPECTED Microsoft to design a NEW WAY to work with complex spreadsheets on a finger-based OS that didn't involve just copying what they already rehashed to us TEN YEARS ago. Apple's Numbers at least attempts to invent a new interface... It's Microsoft's show, they have "unlimited" funds, and "unlimited" access to the smartest programmers on the wirld at Microsoft Research.... And they refused to accept that the public REJECTED their take on Tablet apps for the third time in a DECADE.

QuickOffice is their offline product. It has been floating around since the Palm days to read MS Office docs. The only problem is that QuickOffice never picked up OpenOffice file types... And that is what Google Docs are built on natively.

If Google would move on the OpenOffice compatibility they could grab a bunch of Linux Desktop offices as well that use LibreOffice included in lots of distros. And LibreOffice is free for Macs and PCs so google could do a Google Docs plugin.

Microsoft has allowed too much NIH from MS Office management and they are about to lose their Monopoly money. They were supposed to have a native Dot Net version of Office 3-5 years ago.. They could have been running it on Xboxes... But the Office team couldn't do the job. They couldn't deliver a Native Metro Office either... So the Office team not doing their homework means Windows RT has to run a "fake desktop" for MICROSOFT'S FLAGSHIP PRODUCT. That's not Winning. So is it a surprise that MS can't get an iOS or Android version out? Microsoft has lashed their shops together so tightly they can't pick them apart... They can't even keep up a MAC version of Office without a year lead time.

So while the FOJ was utterly ineffective in intro long Microsoft's behavior with the law, at least Microsoft's 10 year focus on bending and weaseling out of the DOJ rules took their collective eyeballs off MAKING SOFTWARE. (Kin and Courier could have won them back share YEARS ago) And now the little ships like Apple and Google have paddled far enough away on different directions Microsoft can't hurt them anymore.

It will be a return to the younger cooler days.. The Halcon days before Jonny Appleseed was taking over in its ivory tower. Google has created a device that will Connect to your Nexus using the open sources available on the internet. These will let you show birthday invitations to your bioroid friends.

Just watch out for it trying to take over the world by connecting directly to people's brains to make them better.

(Sorry, it's too late and the clever is flickering out)

The issue I that we know they have missles, and we know that have some nukes...so how much of a mess are they going to make?

Yes, we are conducting excersizes, but we do that every year... Until NK wants to call off the war they'll have to deal with it.

You silly people complaining about deductions. The whole "fair tax" thing is a scam. Most regular folk under $100k end up about 12-18% income taxes. It's the PAYROLL taxes that get you for another 15% OFF THE TOP with ZERO deductions.

If you do get to $200k then you start hitting the 28% brackets... But realize Mitt or Warren ar like our parent poster... They claim ALL capital gains and only pay 15% with ZERO PAYROLL taxes (SS, FICA, etc) taken out. So like Mitt's numbers last year, he paid a flat 14% after business deductions... On $14 Million. You at $75k or $100k still have that 15% PAYROLL taxes off the top BEFORE you figure your IRS taxes...

In the 1950-1970's capital gains WAS Income Tax.. And it went higher than 50% at the million dollar levels. It wasn't till the late 1970-1980's that the top brackets for capital gains dropped to lower than WORKING WAGE EARNERS. When we talk about something like Social Security being 1/3 the budget, realize that tax used to STOP at $110k in wages. After that people got their 8% back! But realize LITTLE of that money was from "taxing the rich" and worse they borrowed it from the little people to cut taxed the rich did pay.

So stop the whole "fair tax" talk and knock the capital gains to 28% where a $200k computer programmer would pay. That would double the take from Mitt and Warren overnight.

He made $60k on capital gains... Because he runs a corporation that is a Job Creator. We only tax Capital gains at 15% or in his case it would be retained earnings until he "payed" himself dividends.