I'm only putting this on my car if a person who wants into my space funds me with some bitcoins.

Heck, for a dollar I'll let anyone go ahead of me at a 4-way.

This is the part I don't understand- why does the block chain size need to enlarge? The system could just go on with block chains no larger than 1MB, could it not?

I think there's a great deal to be said for helping people in your community first. The results are more available to you, and recourse in the event of (e.g.) embezzlement of charity dollars is also more available.

I try very hard to memorize my numbers, but since my running average in between credit card theft activity appears to be about 1 year, that's a lot of effort for nothing.

Seriously; I do not give out my credit card number to sketchy sites and try to avoid scams, yet it gets stolen anyway. For example, I am a Linode customer and they announced that they were hacked the day after I gave them my new credit card that had been updated as a result of a motel booking scam in which my credit card was stolen. Replacing my credit card twice in less than one month? Ugh.

Processing new blocks will still be profitable because of the built-in "transaction fee" mechanism. Miners in the year 2100 may simply refuse to include transactions that don't have a fee of 0.000001 BTC, for example. At which point, there will be so many of them, that itself could be profitable. The profit is then not the fact that you minted 1 BTC, but the fact that you collected all the fees in the transaction block.

Since the current Kepler has produced stunning science, I sure hope they put another one up when this one conks out thanks to losing the last of its gyroscopes. It's a shame that Kepler is facing a crash just as it is hitting stride.

I find the experience similar to yours, but I perceive there to be a great deal more "boring" code. When you get right down to it, really only about 5% of code is interesting in any meaningful way. There's a risk that poor workmanship will sneak in, but then again if your tests aren't good enough it really doesn't matter if you're drunk, stoned, stupid, tired, or cocksure, the product will suck.

The problem to watch out for is to think an idea is good when stoned, then tricking yourself into thinking it is still good when sober.

> The hassle of managing encryption far outweighs the risk posed by unencrypted transmission.

Now that is absolutely not the case. PKI scales, and these days with a SIM card in most phones it is almost free as long as you set it up right. That part is hard, but it's a basically constant cost which gets less expensive over time.

There's the implicit statement that all smart meters are deployed the same way. Since this experiment shows that one smart meter vendor is producing sniffable traffic. It does not show that all vendors are in the same situation.

Some vendors are better than others in this regard.

'nuf said.

No, we are not supposed to turn a blind eye. We're supposed to talk about it openly and voice our concerns.

And then cash our paychecks.

Slackware -> RedHat -> Mandrake -> RedHat -> Mandrake -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint

All the while dabbling in FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, and briefly the Solaris/Debian combo.