It doesn't matter if they used Triple Double-Dog Secret Patent Pending NSA-Certified ROT13, a large collection of four-digit PINs is about the best known plaintext short of the Pledge of Allegiance. If they aren't salted, it's open season on those cardholders.

Do you have curtains on your bedroom window?

They don't have an endgame. People who can think beyond the next five minutes don't generally end up chanting slogans, waving signs, and vandalizing buses.

On a 3 GHz CPU the worst sort algorithm you can imagine should still run a thousand times faster than necessary for a graph this small. This effect is either incompetence or malice, not the result of a bad algorithm choice.

*Are you claiming that, in the presence of human error, the risks of nuclear power are comparable to other sources*

Yes. Coal-fired plants also have a radioactive waste disposal problem, too, but they solve it by spewing the waste into the air. This pollution probably kills even more people every year than Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island combined, but it doesn't glow green, melt through concrete, or otherwise look scary on CNN, so nobody cares.

"You could, but frankly, we'd rather talk about the 16.76 GB of underage duck-rape porn that you downloaded between August 6, 2004 and September 30 of the same year. Why don't you have a seat over there?"

And the folks in this thread might argue that the failure of a fifty-year-old reactor operated without regard to best practices, well past its design lifetime in a seismically-active tsunami zone, says less than nothing about the safety of the nuclear power industry as a whole.

Well, I don't think anyone (sane) would argue that the government should have no power at all to enforce laws. It's just that a government that is omnipresent enough to keep you from talking on a cell phone on an airplane just because it annoys people is also powerful enough to prohibit something perfectly reasonable that you want to do, too.

Nobody on here seems to understand that.

It's important to note that the cell phone frequencies that must be blocked in consumer receivers sold in the US are the old AMPS analog phone frequencies. They are not the same frequencies as what your GSM phone uses. I'm not sure it's even legal for the carriers to support AMPS anymore, in fact.

Some people are crazy enough to think that the government should only dictate how we act when our actions harm others.

I don't understand how you can compare someone talking in a (presumably) normal voice to someone using an artificial noisemaking instrument.

Is it just that you can't eavesdrop on both sides of the conversation? Is that what bugs people about other peoples' cell phone usage in their vicinity? Because I've gotta say, I'm at a complete loss here. I don't understand the issue at all.

And how is this a legitimate function of government?

To the extent BTC can be compared to gold, then perhaps it is best not considered a currency at all, deflationary or otherwise, but rather a basis for other currencies. That suggests that new currencies will emerge that are pegged to BTC, just as the US dollar was formerly based on gold.

All of your objections are valid, but they also apply to gold. Gold mining is mostly an occupation for large organizations with access to large amounts of machinery and energy. It is hard to cash out without taking a financial beating from back-alley dealers with "I Buy Gold!" signs. It can be forfeited to the government, and in fact has been declared illegal for individuals to own in the past. The origins and history of a given sample are traceable to some extent through modern spectroscopy and radiometric techniques. Gold, too, lends itself to criminal activity in many respects. It would be time-consuming for individual merchants to confirm transactions in gold, given thousands of years' worth of counterfeiting tricks. And it has massive scalability problems due to, well, its mass.

Yet few people deny that gold has value as either a basis for a given currency or as a hedge against one.

(Shrug) So what else is new? Bill Gates has the same problem.

What's the incentive for the company to sell their ASIC miner, given those numbers? They would make more money just by plugging it in, wouldn't they?