With technology, we can preserve a lot of genetic diversity in frozen embryos, eggs, sperm. So there are ways of mitigating the risk of genetic trait loss with a lower population.

It is a little more complicated than that because perception within field of view changes with distance. But your idea does suggest some interesting experiments: how/whether variations in stripe width and distance to striped object can affect insect flight patterns.

There will be transaction fees. Because of what jeremyp said. Also, it is only a minscule slice of the people on this planet who can dare touch more than pocket change worth of bitcoin, without the benefits of some kind of insurance. Exchanges will step in and be part of that solution, eventually, once they are stable and respected enough to be backed by real money. So that "large amounts of money anywhere in the world for free" is never going to happen, in any important sense.

Bitcoin and similar have a shot at competing with credit cards. The real question is how much lower the fees be than 3%, once all kinds of overhead are factored in. Thinking in terms of zero costs is just a fantasy. Luckily for the bitcoin aficionados, the bar for success if not nearly so high. They do not have to achieve zero fees in order to be a big success.

At least the Chinese gov't does not have to worry about its people liking to gamble....

There is a degree of guesswork I was making. It could be spiders, or it could be that these shifts look like movement, which might be a bird.

I was just watching a mockingbird in my yard the other day. They hunt for bugs by standing still on ground under bushes, then opening their wings. The underside of their wings has a strong white & dark pattern. Apparently that can trigger an insect flight instinct of some kind, causing the insects to move, revealing their location to the sharp eyes of a very still bird's head.

So this black & white trick is not unique to zebras. Even a hunter can use it against the insects. That suggests the instinct must be quite valuable to the insects themselves.

Your is a reasonable hypothesis. I would offer another hypothesis: that stripes seen through multifaceted eyes resemble flashes of light -- which is you only tell tale sign you are about you get caught in a spider web; thus flying insects will turn away from the perceived flashing object.

My guess: Flying towards a striped surface, when you are dependent on multi-faceted bug eyes, looks like flashes of light. Flying insects have evolved instincts to avoid flashes of light, because that is your only tell tale sign that you are about to get caught in a spider web.

So it is not that they have an "aversion" to striped surfaces exactly. But when approaching a striped surface they will tend to suddenly turn 90 degrees away, which comes out to the same effect.

This. If you are not in a studio, getting a good shot is hard. If you are not in a studio, getting a good sound clip is hard. Getting both right at the same time is 1000X as hard. So it is normal to not bother. In movies. In documentaries. In television shows. The editors are constantly "re-creating" the right sound based on the uneven quality sound clips they get handed, and pulling from sound clip libraries whatever else they need.

Yes, it was in the interest of the German people to not play the war game, from a rational point of view. We understand that. However, in Hitler's estimate, his own personal interests and the interests of the German people were served best by other means.

Both Hitler and Stalin often acted as if they feared their generals more than their outside enemies. This underlying motivation precipitated decisions that were against the interests of the people of their respective nations, and creates thousands of "if I were in charge" scenarios. But the fear that Hitler (or Stalin) himself might be put out to pasture (or under perhaps under the pasture) unless he produced a string of military successes is not actually crazy at all. The assassinations attempts did almost get Hitler before the Red Army came near.

I have personally known software developers with multiple patents to their name who thought patents only rarely made sense. Their employer foot the bill, obviously. In fact, they argued the patents were so worthless and confusing that they had trouble understanding half the patents that were based on their own work.

Thank you, for the confirmation. So, in principle, if one were running an exchange that might be having problems, a diligent and honest operator could shut down for a week or so, and validate all their currency using public keys by inspecting the blockchain. Since public keys are public, having an up to date inventory at your fingertipcs should be a basic accounting practice (otherwise how could I ever do any transaction at all). That MtGox could not accomplish this or chose not to accomplish this (or did so and kept the facts close to its chest) makes me now lean towards Inside Job as the likely story.

Also,if I understand it all correctly, in principle, it is possible to watch the block chain and observe your own coin has been "stolen", because the public keys used to validate are public. Whether that is practical I do not have any idea.

Yours is a very plausible theory.

The slightly more innocent (but still probably criminal) interpretation is that MtGox employees were scrambling to make transfers that kept themselves financially whole, while the company burned down with everyone else's assets. That is usually fraud when viewed under the bright lights of a courtroom, because of the implied or explicit promises made to customers, even when the company somehow escapes the usual fiduciary duty to its account holders.

A week ago there was a rumor going around that 200,000 bitcoin seemed to have been transferred to a place the CEO had provably had involvement with in the past. It could be that the CEO finally recognized that his own efforts to cover his tracks were inadequate, and if he did not "discover" this "accounting error", he would be put in jail.

It is possible for things to get temporarily or permanently lost by transferring around your own wallets. But an actual thief would be 100% likely to do a real transfer of that money, making the old keys obsolete, for the very reason that it is not actually stolen until you make the transaction impossible or very hard to reverse.

The answer is probably "no". The problem is that unless you are a professional, you are an easy target for some other fan to claim you stole their idea, thus muddling up the rights. Someone in the business can be trusted to not cross the lines, because real professionals have more good ideas of their own than they could finish in ten lifetimes. Professionals actually read very little fanfic. Many (most?) fans who write fanfic read a lot of fanfic, or, at least, that is what a jury will be easily convinced of. So the possibility of honest errors skirting too close to the legal line is vastly greater with fanfic authors. Fanfic is a headache best avoided.