Gobsmacked that no-one has marked this article "personofinterest".

I bet the NSA / CIA / FBI get a woody for this kind of technology.

They'd have to have the same characteristics as cash, which include some measures so that you can be sure they aren't forgeries.

Alas, this is not possible with Bitcoin. As a transaction log, the only thing a "wallet" is is a private key. A paper wallet, for example, is just a particular encoding of that key on a piece of paper. The key is all that's needed to transfer the balance to another key - ie, spend the Bitcoin.

The person who created that wallet could easily have another copy of the private key, therefore you don't have any assurance of the value of a given wallet until you have successfully transferred it's balance to another wallet that you exclusively control. You should treat all paper wallets and any other novelty means of storing wallets offline as potentially valueless - it's only the completed transaction that has value.

You can't "hand out" Bitcoins. Bitcoin is a consensus. To subvert Bitcoin, you'd have to deploy computing power in excess of all that already spent on the blockchain, which is unlikely or impossible even for the US Government.

Your scenario where there are "fake" Bitcoins in "circulation" isn't possible because it's not cash. It's a transaction log, and because it uses the participation of all the Bitcoin peers to verify that it's legitimate, it's virtually impossible to forge, unlike physical cash.

There's nothing special you'd have to do to have an international Bitcoin - it's already international, because it's based on maths, and not the threat of force as per fiat currencies backed by governments.

It's a shame it's a toy implementation that won't actually scale.

Bitcoin is not cash.

It requires you to be online to make transactions, can't make rapid transactions, isn't anonymous (or at least is much less anonymous) and isn't a physical object.

No, you can't. This ill-informed troll keeps cropping up, but it's just a total misconception about how it all works.

Bitcoin is a vast distributed transaction log. The only thing you store in that wallet is a private key. The coins are out there in the transaction log. The key just identifies the ones that you own. Only the holder of the private key can produce a transaction signed with that key, which is what is required to transfer the coins to another holder.

When you spend BTC, you create a transaction record and sign it with that key. That transaction then enters the Bitcoin network and peers verify whether it's correct or not. Whichever transaction gets consensus first wins - even if you created 100 transactions spending the same coin, only one of them will succeed.

Being dumb enough to believe that your transaction is good without this verification is equally as dumb as believing that an IOU from a random stranger you've never met before will be paid. Hence no-one actually does this - they only consider themselves paid when the network verifies that the BTC are owned by their wallet.

.. having been separated last year, I've been hitting the internet dating, including Tinder.

Anyone who uses a Bitstrip as a profile photo gets rejected instantly unless they are very, very compelling otherwise. It just conveys a complete lack of honesty and originality to me..

VBA is almost VB6.

VBScript is not quite VBA. There are some VERY annoying inconsistencies, like this :

For ii = 0 To 10
        ' Do Stuff
Next ii ' This is legal in VBA / VB6 - but it's a syntax error in VBScript!

You're probably a Starfleet officer or a trader if you're buying in Quark's, in which case you either get a latinum stipend from the Federation or have trading profits. In either case you voluntarily adopted an unusual, high-risk lifestyle and represent something of an oddity.

You could probably get something at the replimat for for free* as well. In Quark's you're mostly paying for the atmosphere and the Dabo girls.

* in an environment like DS9 with a limited supply of energy and mass there are probably rations (e.g. "mass credit" mentioned in some of the books) but no necessity to pay for things with exchange currency, as it's a Federation station.

The Federation clearly had an economy of sorts. Joseph Sisko had a restaurant in high demand, the Picard family had a traditional vineyard, so luxury goods and services still attracted a premium, but I don't think they traded with money. Voyager was probably the best illustration of the economy of the Federation - replicator use was rationed because energy became a scarce resource due to the need to run the engines at full tilt without stopping to refuel with antimatter.

The economy would be based on energy, given that starship travel makes obtaining most previously rare materials a question of spending energy. Given the ubiquitous manufacturing capability combined with fusion generators as small as a trash can, it would be impossible to restrict the means of production to a ruling class of capitalists, so status becomes the main indicator of success. This is emphasised heavily within Star Trek plots - high status scientists, sportsmen, and of course, starship officers are plentiful. But none of them are notable for merely owning things - all of them are accomplished in some way.

In a starship economy, money as a means of exchange would be ridiculous - although the sequence of barter trades you mention from DS9 also seems ridiculous to me, because so many of the goods concerned just seem like something you'd just squeeze out of a replicator.

Energy would be cheap, because if you needed more of it, you'd just construct more generators / harvesters.

Your supply of material goods would only be limited by the supply of energy and mass. If you need uncommon or non-replicable elements (let's presume that using the replicator for transmutation is prohibitively expensive), you dispatch a starship to find some. This costs energy. See point 1.

It makes no sense to move any matter cargo that isn't a rare element via a starship, because common elements are everywhere, even if transmutation is expensive.

So money would be a bit pointless

* Because the price for anything common is "really cheap".
* You can't pay for rare things with common things, because everyone has the common things already.
* A common exchange rate is going to be impossible to keep stable because the only things worth trading are rare

I think the Ferengi economy is actually the curiosity in this setting ; it seems to depend on artificial scarcity (and repression of entire social groups, from the way they treat their women).

And some of it's ideas in ownCloud 6 : operational transform collaborative editing available for OpenDocument in the browser.

In the UK, the Data Protection Act requires that they delete your data on request.

They are not a thing - you can't sell them. You are effectively selling a service - signing a particular transaction record with a cryptographic key. If this is an illegal service, then being a notary public is probably illegal too.

Wow, if we could save 2% of GDP, that's £40B, which is our entire education budget.

The original OEM mice for Amiga were TERRIBLE though, although it wasn't the ball / roller tech which was equivalent to other mice at the time.

They were boxy and uncomfortable, but the buttons were the worst bit - they used leaf switches, not microswitches, and they'd wear out with relatively little use. I remember dismantling the mouse and inserting pieces of cereal box to try and eke more life out of them. I was so glad when I changed to a new mouse with microswitch buttons.

It's because HR know jack about the field they are recruiting from. They therefore ask for specifics, which means that the people hiring spew out a list of the skills that the current incumbent in the target job has (or a similar job).

And it wouldn't wash with them if you just put down "Must be able to think logically, and learn new stuff quickly", which as far as I know are the only real requirements for programming jobs. They'd have to work out how to assess that, instead of counting bullet points on a CV.

Sometimes I wonder if the dearth of decent programmers that seems to be a fact of life in the current hiring environment is purely down to the HR department filtering all the decent candidates out. Our jobs go out internal to our organization first (we're the largest employer in Europe, so that's not TOO bad), so I guess all the applicants I get have been double-filtered.

And of course, there is no budget for slack. If someone capable of doing the job leaves, why, you should be able to fill his position with someone just as capable almost immediately! Workers are fungible little peons! There is no acknowledgement that you can't replace experience, much of it specific to the work.

The real solution is to have a pro-active policy of hiring inexperienced people, training them up, and promoting their loyalty, but no-one wants to do this, because the standard industry remuneration policies don't promote loyalty, so any kind of investment in people is seen as a waste because the only way that people get a decent raise is by jumping ship to another employer. It's a vicious cycle - you can't hire people to train them because you can't keep them. So the end result is that the only way you forge new capability is by destroying entire development teams and recreating them from scratch, losing man-decades of experience and productive working relationships in the process.