I disagree. These Bitcoin stories are great comedy. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, made all the more amusing by the people riding the train shouting out the windows at those jumping off, calling them fools and insisting that the train will somehow swerve around the obstacle and keep going.

I love how the only consistent defense of Bitcoin is that "ordinary" currency suffers from all the same problems. First off, that's not true, but even if it was, Bitcoin's problems are on steroids. That defense is like refusing to leave a burning house because it's uncomfortably hot outside.

------RM

But the government can always buy with dollars. Why? Because people will always want dollars. Why? Because people need dollars in order to pay their taxes.

I think you're confusing two things here. The fact that a government's currency has a base value in the currency's use to pay taxes and other gov't obligations doesn't mean that runaway inflation can't make it worthless.

------RM

No you haven't.

This happens every time Apple announces a new product. Someone invariably claims that it's nothing new, because some half-assed crappy version of the idea exists somewhere. Then once the product is actually released, everyone is amazed at what a leap it is.

This goes all the way back to the iPod. "Oooh, an MP3 player. Big deal. I have one of those."

------RM

...the conjecture could be more simply stated "Every hailstone sequence ends".

Or even more simply stated "Every hailstone sequence eventually contains a power of 2".

------RM

Okay, I'm being semi-facetious. But when I want a torrent of something, I never type in Pirate Bay's URL. I go to one of the many torrent search sites easily found by Google. Of the torrent files I download, many point to a Pirate Bay tracker, but just as many don't.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see what is accomplished by singling out the Pirate Bay at this point.

------RM

Why don't you educate unicorns and the tooth fairy while you're at it? The "Mac user who thinks his system is invulnerable" is a fictional creature created by Windows apologists. Mac users don't think their systems are perfectly secure. They just think they're more secure than Windows. And they're right.

------RM

Here's a forum discussing the topic: The Raptor Is Coming

I believe we're supposed to anoint ourselves with A-1 Steak Sauce.

------RM

Camping's next radio broadcast is going to be AWKward!

------RM

This is by far and away the single most hilarious thing about this prediction. Time zones are established by man's laws, yet this heavenly event is supposed to follow them. So let me get this straight:

-- If I live on the border of the Eastern and Central time zones, and see my friends floating into the air, and I don't want to go yet (because I want to tweet to everybody about what I saw), I can run a few feet to the east, and God will grant me 60 more minutes on Earth?
-- Will God start the Rapture in Venezuela 30 minutes before the rest of South America?
-- What about the International Date Line? Will some islands have to wait a full day to be raptured?
-- And God respects Daylight Savings Time too?

That last one makes me think... Y'know, if God is bound to obey the local time set by the local laws of the local humans, what's to stop a government from passing a law turning the clocks ahead one hour precisely one minute after 5:59 PM? No rapture for you, comades!

------RM

O_O Okay.

Well, it's like this. I didn't remember when 4chan was founded, just that it seemed like "a long time ago". I knew it was at least 2004, because I remember reading /b/ before I moved to my current home. And seemed a while before that. Guess I should've Googled.

2003? Really? That means I was reading 4chan back when it just started! I'm never cool enough to get in on the ground floor of anything.

And because of this stupid mistake, everyone will ignore my points. Fine. I'll just post them again in the next thread about "Anonymous the Hacking Robin Hoods".

------RM

Those of us who have know of 4chan for 10+ years can't help but be a little perplexed at this transformation of Anonymous into "Hacking Heroes of the People". For as long as I remember, Anonymous, or as they used to call themselves, "/b/tards", were more known for pulling elaborate Internet trolls, vandalizing web pages, and basically creating chaos just "for the lulz". Far from being heroic, these people could be a nightmare. Get the wrong kind of attention from the Anonymous horde, and find your personal information posted all over the web.

Then they chose a few targets who everybody agreed deserved it: white supremacists, Scientology, arrogant corporations. Suddenly the media decides they're heroes and everyone just eats it up.

Sorry, I don't buy it. This is the same group that popularized the phrase "TITS OR GTFO", who created Pedobear. I don't buy that these people have suddenly grown Hearts of Pure Good. In their heart, they still get off on creating chaos for fun, and eventually they'll go back to it. Some 4channers will web-harass some teenage girl who made an ass of herself on the Internet (as already happened once), or do something else morally reprehensible, and will use the Anonymous banner because why not? Then the media's collective head will explode as they try to understand why their wonderful Internet Bandit Heroes have turned bad.

------RM

I don't understand this. I can work with BitTorrent from behind my home router without doing anything special. It just works. Why would an additional level added at the ISP change anything? (Unless I don't understand what NAT is.)

------RM

Well, I guess it depends on your definition of the word "system". In recent years, I've designed, coded and implemented sets of new COBOL programs and CICS screens that automate processes that were still being done by hand. To me, that's a new system, especially since the user sees this development as something brand-new, not a addition to an existing set of screens. However, at the core, these new programs and screens have to interface with legacy files to manipulate data. If you require a system to be entirely new, even down to the data, you might disagree that this is a "new" system. But as far as the users are concerned, it's new.

------RM

Well, gee... I must be imagining the over 100 new COBOL programs I've written over the past seven years. You see, I do this for a living, and make a pretty decent living at that. I work for an insurance company. The policy and billing management systems are implemented in COBOL on an IBM mainframe, and if we want to keep pace with our competitors, new development is essential. Recently we upgraded the web interface external clients use to access our billing data. While that involved a lot of web design and Java programming, at its core was a set of brand new COBOL programs that fetch the data from the legacy system. (And send it back as XML. Yeah, COBOL can do that.)

I graduated from college in 1989, and didn't study COBOL because everyone told me it was a dead language. When I entered the job market in 1991, every job opening I found required COBOL experience. I was lucky to get a job with a consulting outfit that was willing to train me, and that was the beginning of an 18-year career programming COBOL, CICS, and occasionally DB2. Throughout that career, I would hear again and again that COBOL was a dinosaur language and was going away. Meanwhile, I continued to design and code new programs and systems in this supposedly dead language.

So you'll have to forgive me if I don't worry too much about the "death" of COBOL.

------RM

Seriously. I read on the web and hear on the news how Anonymous "crashed Visa.com and Mastercard.com"! Oooh! What a terrifying demonstration of their power! Let me check... Nope, both sites still up. Supposedly their next target was Amazon.com. If that was even true in the first place, the attack was ineffective.

C'mon folks -- These guys are a joke. They're not an awe-inspiring force of Internet destruction. They're an annoyance, a mosquito buzzing in your ear. So they took down a website for a moment or two. Like those sites have never been down before. The sites come back up, the world goes on. I doubt the majority of credit card customers were even aware anything had happened.

Face it, the only reason these kids are gaining so much attention is because the story sounds good on the news.

------RM