Or enough people start using the black market and a black market currency to do almost all of their trading instead. In most countries, it is more expensive to use the black market and risk the punishments for tax evasion than to simply pay the tax, but there is a level where it become more economically smart to use the black market and risk getting caught than to pay the onerous taxes.

Yes, via generics. They are even more flexible than C++ because you can add constraints.

Not directly. .NET is garbage collected, and although finalizers are called whenever the object is cleaned up (so you know it will be called), there is no guarantee when it will be called. Unlike Java though, C# does support support Ruby/Python style closure blocks ("using" statement) so although it is not automatic, RAII can be done.

Yep, and they even have the same assembly format, common type specifications, and IL code across platforms. Whereas C++'s objects and libraries vary based on platform and architecture, .NET is uniform across implementations.

Man, you just wasted a lot of dialogue on an obvious troll. Troll: 1 Neokushan: 0.

Mod parent up.
This is exactly my point. As long as there are drug buyers and sellers via Silk Road, there will also be bitcoin buyers and sellers.

The point is that while it's not untraceable, it can be anonymous, given the correct precautions.

I'd agree with you except for one thing: the Silk Road. Like oil and dollars, it only accepts bitcoins for payment. There will always be some value in bitcoins as long as you can use them to trade for drugs. There will always be people willing to trade dollars for your bitcoins so that they can use them to buy drugs, even if you don't want drugs. For a while bitcoins have been just another small medium of exchange like e-gold, but with the Silk Road they are becoming more like another currency.

Valve has actually been pretty proactive on this front. They recently released their SteamGuard system which authenticates logins from new computers via email. It doesn't help if the user uses one password for both his email and Steam, but it's pretty good against most password thefts.

Tell that to Harold Camping.

That's the whole point of Coreboot. The reason that booting is so slow is because of three things: the BIOS, the hard drive, and the OS itself. My laptop originally took about a minute to boot, but once I installed an SSD, it dropped to 20 seconds. The creaky BIOSs all run in 16-bit mode and have so many numerous hacks (like the INT 13h fixes) that most modern OSs don't use them hardly at all. Coreboot slims it down so that booting is even faster and eliminates all the legacy crap that's been tagging along since the 1980s. All that's left to do is optimize the operating systems so that they boot faster, and you have a fully functional OS that boots almost as fast as your little Splashtop system, with the ability to install patches and run a browser that's newer than Firefox 2 (the creaky old browser in Splashtop).

Mod parent up! I've deployed dozens of .NET apps on Linux using Mono, even several OpenGL apps (use the Tao framework). Except for some stupid version differences with Ubuntu (the LTS ships an old version of Mono that didn't support .NET 4.0) it's just been a matter of dragging and dropping a .exe or writing a makefile and building it.

No, but if you had a unique address for them at your own domain then you could bounce all the spam to one of their email addresses.

If it was his helicopter on his land, then I don't see what the problem is. The dang government is filled with too many control freaks who want to dictate what everyone else can do. This guy should just tell them to go eat a lemon.

You need to reread your bible. It was Abraham's nephew Lot who got drunk and slept with his daughters.

Apparently, having to run System Restore every hour also wipes out viruses.

This should be true, but since the patent office often approves patents without doing a proper prior art check, then it probably won't work this way in practice. What needs to happen is for this "patent reform" bill to allow the patent office to be sued for issuing a blatantly invalid patent. If there is obvious prior art or it is obviously vague, then they could be sued for the cost of invalidating the patent plus some other damages (such as loss of sales if case of an injunction). The patent office would then be much more cautious about approving invalid or questionable patents.