I still see people espousing all 3 viewpoints, and they're all still true. The collapse of the latest scam doesn't change what BitCoin is. It's just as trustworthy as before. Vendors are just as trustworthy (or untrustworthy) as before. And the math is the same as before.

I wouldn't judge BTC against the other currencies of the world. It's clearly not the same, and it's not trying to be the same. People who use it don't (or shouldn't, if they're smart) consider it to be the same. But that doesn't mean it's without merit or useless. It's just got a different risk profile than other currencies, but it also comes with different benefits.

That's true for all goods, and all currencies. If you order a book on Amazon.com and they suddenly disappear, taking all your money with them - what recourse do you have? If you sell something on eBay and send out goods before you receive payment, that's just like completing a BitCoin transaction before you get your dollars. How are you better protected?

You must trust the other party in all transactions, no matter what you're exchanging. And if you don't trust them, go through an escrow service...assuming you can trust them.

Wha...? The only "exchange" you have to go through to get a Bitcoin is exchanging dollars for an encrypted key. If the Bitcoin isn't sent, you can reverse the charge.

Why the hell are you keeping Bitcoins in a "bank", rather than keeping them in a wallet that you control?

Actually, we prefer to pay with little pieces of green paper. It's much more secure than the plastic stuff, chip, pin, or whatnot...

We used to use money that had actual value, but that perfectly logical practice was deemed barbaric by our betters in the last century.

As Scott McNealy famously said (and was pilloried for here on Slashdot, IIRC), "You've got no privacy anyway - get over it."

Turns out UPS (but not FedEx) will deliver anywhere with an address - even a vacant lot. A buddy of mine had his card used to buy thousands of dollars worth of TVs and other home entertainment electronics that were delivered to a vacant lot in Round Rock. The bad guys just waited for the truck to leave, then swooped in and loaded up. Far as I know, they were never caught. (To be fair, this was a few years ago, one would hope UPS has changed their policy on this....)

That's just another one of those old canards... /geese

Oh, that sounds really f-ing convenient...

That's because electronic evidence *isn't*.

You're assuming people even *can* look at their statements in something like an real-time fashion.

A great many of us (even here at /.) deliberately disable any and all "online banking" features, simply because we *know* they're not secure. If someone compromises my card (it would have to be someone else, since I don't allow *any* online account access) , then unless the bank or card bureau calls me, I have no way to know until I get my next statement in the mail. (No, I don't allow electronic statements, either.)

BTW, I was comparing notes with a good friend of mine the other day - he's one of the world's leading experts on software engineering (his seminal paper is cited more than any other), and he's even tostricter on this stuff than I am - and for *all* the right reasons.

The actual point of concern from fracking is not about the fluids, the water, or any of the bullshit you see people ranting about. The problem is that they are re-using old wells which were drilled a long time ago, and those wells go through the water table and natural aquifers in many cases. Those old wells tend to have shoddy and/or degraded casings (the walls of the wells are lined usually with some type of concrete or metal tubing to prevent them from collapsing), so when they are pumping the shit down the well they can tend to leak somewhat.

Well put. It's important to realize that by the very nature of there being trapped gas, that means that there is at least one (generally several) layers of highly impermiable cap rock above the natural gas, so thick and durable that they've contained a highly-mobile gas for millions of years (despite earthquakes and the like), all of which is several kilometers down - versus the groundwater which is a couple dozen to a couple hundred meters down. Creating cracks a couple dozen centimeters long several kilometers well below the cap rock down has essentially no effect on the leak rate from the reservoir up through *kilometers* of rock (which would take ages for anything they're injecting now to reach anyway). The problem is the well, which by its very nature must pierce through each layer on its way down - including your groundwater layers. Even new wells aren't perfect (as we well know). Reusing old wells is a recipie for leaks.

The solution to water shortages isn't to cry about frakking, it's to start advancing our de-salinization technology

I don't know... desalinization generally takes crazy amounts of energy to produce enough for agriculture, just by the very nature of the energy state of saltwater versus fresh. There is one concept I read about a few years back which I thought was pretty clever that might work around that, though - it was to use open evaporation pools to create super-saline water and to have it flow past two ion-specific membranes (one for negative ions, the other for positive) connecting to adjacent pools, creating a salt gradient pressure into those pools. Each of those pools in turn have their opposite ion-specific membrane connected to a final regular-saltwater pool. For an ion to follow the diffusion gradient and leave the super-saturated pool into an adjacent pool, that adjacent pool must suck an opposite ion from the final saltwater pool - which it will do if the gradient from the super-saturated pool is strong enough. The final pool stays balanced because ions are being lost to each adjacent pool. Eventually the final saltwater pool will become freshwater.

That which I find really neat about this concept is that it doesn't use electricity beyond basic water pumps and the like - the energy powering it is simply evaporation of seawater, which is ridiculously easy to achieve in many desert locations. In many places a mere jetty is enough to turn hundreds of square miles of ocean into an evaporation pool. The challenge is of course mass production of sufficient flow rate ion-selective membranes and keeping them from clogging.

I'm not sure I'd call a sodium reactor more safe. Heck, liquid sodium explodes in contact with concrete, and the very reactor itself is built out of concrete. They have to clad it in thick steel as a precaution, and after a sodium leak in Japan, the sodium ate over halfway through the steel. Liquid sodium is not nice, friendly stuff.

And I don't think there's anywhere *near* enough data on thorium reactors. All the happy-go-lucky stuff sounds all too much like the sort of sales pitches that accompany each new generation of nuclear reactor.

If I had to pick one that I thought had the most promise, it'd be lead-bismuth. Now, they have their own set of corrosion problems, no question. But at least there's a damned lot of data from the former USSR on how to prevent it. Beyond that, leaks are pretty harmless (apart from economically) - your worst case scenario is that your reactor entombs itself in lead, which most people would consider *desirable* in a worst-case reactor leak. There's no explosion risk from lead-bismuth. It's a breeder approach like sodium, so little waste and highly efficient fuel usage. And the emergency circulation in modern designs is mostly passive.

But honestly, the biggest issue I have with nuclear is cost. The nuclear industry is one of the few industries out there that has demonsingtrated a long-term *negative* learning curve in terms of cost. That is, the longer we run nuclear power plants, the more added risks we learn we have to address (which costs money), the higher the disposal cost estimates versus earlier estimates, and on and on. Scaling factors mean that plants usually have to be very large which means that you don't learn as much from building lots of them with varying approaches. And the generally best way to deal with a problem of escalating costs on a design - start anew with a radically different design - means you start the learning curve over, which takes decades on nuclear due to the slow pace. And the newer approaches are often more complicated in order to solve the previous problems, which introduces new potential avenues of failure.

It's a real problem. All issues of safety and the environment aside, if nuclear can't address the cost issue, it has no future. Cost kept investors out of nuclear more than NIMBY for three decades. They've been trying again with this latest round of nuclear construction (often with citizens picking up the financial risk if not outright the tab), but the results thusfar haven't been very appealing, with lots of cost overruns.

Cooked with natural gas, no doubt!

Seriously, though... I mean, "NEWS FLASH: Mass production of gas sought for its high energy and ease of combustion poses a fire risk!" Who here is surprised by this? Are there people in town going around saying, "My god, I knew they were producing *natural gas*, but I had no idea they were producing something that could *catch fire*!"

The part of a "home network" that is connected to the 'net is the biggest threat?

It's also the part that's doing the simplest thing (assuming you haven't networked your light switches). No bumbling grandma clicking every popup in sight, no kids downloading their warez. A router should be a rock-solid appliance that shouldn't be able to be "hacked" in any meaningful way without physical access.

Bottom line, it's surprising - or at the very least troubling - that routers are such a security problem.

I can think of some future-tech that might work too. A directed camera-sensing laser that differentiates between camera lenses and eyes with 100% accuracy could do it by saturating only the lenses that aren't allowed to see.

So I guess my answer to the submitter is to develop this tech.

eir eru að tala um rúnir en myndin er bara rispur á spýtu. Hvernig ýðir maður rispur á rúnir?