Two things:

Firstly, if they try to do this, the price of bitcoins will rise wildly as they do so (they cant buy them all at once, and as more bitcoins are taken out of circulation, they will presumably become more valuable). This means that everyone who has bitcoins will make money - nothing lost as far as i can tell.

Secondly, what's to prevent a second issuing - say "Bitcoin 2.0" - from occuring, and the whole thing from starting over? The technology still works, and all that would need to happen would be an announcement on the bitcoin website. I'm pretty sure the government would be concerned about this if they are going to pump a whole load of cash into buying all of them.

Vi Hart (previously featured on /.) has posted a geeky turkey video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjrI91J6jOwm, which I found rather amusing!

I wouldn't even call it an acquired taste - maybe it's genetic, certainly, I've loved strong salty liquorice all my life!

Haha, I hadn't thought about the simulation of the universe consequence, that's pretty remarkable actually!

I know, but I figured i would explain only this consequence to my fellow slashdotters, as the more precise definition is a bit harder to understand :-)

Way to take my joke seriously...

This means that is has just become VERY important for mathematicians to figure out whether PI is normal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number)
(TL;DR version: a normal number is one in which every sequence of digits occurs)

You see, if every sequence occurs in PI, this actually means that no sequence is copyrightable, abolishing copyright right away :)

Just out of curiosity (and failed googling):

What is the source for: "the only apps she'd programmed were a calculator app and an app that sorted numbers."?

I thought the gell keyboard was by far the most clever product...I dont have a tablet, but something like that could make it more viable?

It needs to be thinner / look more sexy. Also, those laser keyboard suck, as there is 0 tactile feedback.

I also think that some of the stuff it does is pointless, if they are really going for a mobile device (many of the ports, and maybe even the projector?, also it's too big and fat to be something you carry around), and on the other hand, some of it's features are pointless if it's NOT a mobile device (built in mouse/keyboard/touchscreen) - it does not look like a particularly handy device to hold, so the touchscreen seems like an unnecessary expense...

I'm pretty sure they would just (as they always have done) kill anybody non-zeta who tries to sell drugs.

Legal or not, the cartels would still be the ones selling drugs. In fact it would probably be easier for them, now that it's legal!

This sounds like a rather week strategy to me. Presumably anything they can make proprietary extensions do will have an OSS alternative before too long. That having been said, anyone who uses these proprietary extensions knows that Oracle can make them expensive if they want to - so if that really is a problem, they just wont be used.

I do however share your concern that Oracle will stop at nothing to milk some money out of MySQL - and unlike OpenOffice.org, MySQL is used everywhere by a very large amount of people. I guess pretty much the only good thing is that PostgresSQL is a solid alternative.

Well IE9 HAS to be the best at "catching attacks aimed at making the user download Web-based malware".

That's because only the most stupid web user (read: the most stupid 50%) click banners which go "OMG YOU MUST MAKE YOU COMPUTER FAST AND NOT HAVE VIRUZES NAO!". And yes...they are using Internet Explorer, because quite frankly, they aren't smart enough to spot that Chrome/Firefox are better than IE.

This should be both +5 Funny and +5 insighful.

Remember that Google was founded in 1998. So its ~13 years old. I don't believe anyone is predicting that the online "buck" will move to China (or for that matter Russia) within the next 13 years. Sure it's moving, but it will be much longer before the spending power of an average Chinese person comes close to that of a "westerner".

My point is Revotron is probably right - those are not the markets that will propel Google to further greatness - at least not by short or medium term Google time.