This is bullshit, everyone would create new works if they get money for it. There is no need for copyright, copyright is counterproductive. It actualy seriously limits sharing of information, it wastes money by preventing us from optimaly utilizing our comunication networks and data storage, it wastes money on useless IP lawsuits, it makes works artificialy and needlesly unavailable to large part of our population.

Artist need money, not copyright. We need to abolish copyright and come up with a system/regulation which will ensure money for creators without artificial limits on distribution of creative content.

In this particular case people seems to sympathize with the court decision but i wonder if they'd equaly support for example the right for privacy of a politician who would ask google to remove references to articles about his past coruption scandals or other inconvinient facts which are no longer "valid" (because the politician in question was never convicted or because he already served his sentence).

I see this decision as higly problematic. Even if google removes the references it could be technicaly chalenging to prevent it's search engine to crawl and index the public data again. I think that the right course of action is to determine if the published data were illegal and if yes then remove them from the source web page.

Maybe not for energy production on earth. But how would you propell space craft in deep space or a lander on dark side of the planet? How would you create elements needed in research, medicine etc. which are products of fission reactions?

I think it is foolish for greens to call for complete abandonment of nuclear technology. We certainly need to research and test it, we need to build specialized reactors for various purposes.

If nobody kept their coins on the exchange it would be not very usefull because there would be nobody to exchange with.

If normal people realy don't care about such matters why are the drugs banned? Stop the ban on production and consumption of drugs and i'm sure the "drug addicts" will stop bothering you about it. If you realy don't care about it it should be no problem for you.

The value is determined on exchanges by suply and demand. You can use site like bitcoinaverage to get price index based on more exchanges and their volume.

There is no exchange considered primary at this time. The biggest ones are probably: bitstamp, btc-e, huobi and btcchina.

The hardware and alectricity is no more wasted than hardware and electricity and employees used by your bank to secure your account.

The last BTC should be mined sometimes in 2140 but the miners will carry on because they are needed to verify transactions. The'll get their profit from transaction fees.

Well you can. For example if copyright is replaced with better government regulation which ensures money for artists without the unneeded and artificial limitation of sharing/copying.

That's true... for now. I think it would be beneficial for bitcoin if deposit insurance in bitcoin banks was mandatory and that it will happen sooner or later if/when bitcoin gets more recognition. Also the way bitcoin works could be seen as advantage over the traditional money transfers (credit cards/wire transfers) where transaction could take months to irreversibly settle.

Also note that if you decide to safeguard your bitcoins yourself you are better off then with real cash/gold. You need to keep your private key and there are many m:n encryption schemes where you divide your key to N pieces and need at least M of them to assemble it back. Those pieces can then be distributed geographically and i think that the level of safety would be good enough. (Assembling the keys to withdraw from such wallet would be quite inconvenient but you could deposit at any time... good for long-term savings).

In the end, it's all about options and i think that bitcoin gives you more of them.

Sorry english is not my primary language and the inability to edit slashdot posts afterwards doesn't help either.

The answer is easy - both of our presumptions are wrong. Bitcoin is not annonymous (it's mostly pseudoannonymous, like credit cards) and it is not easy to get away with exchange robbery - it's crime and the users/law enforcment would be after you.

The reporter probably doesn't understand what's going on at all.

1) the leaked data contains not only the mt.gox DB dump (which seems to be legit) but also the TibanneBackOffice.exe binary which is actualy malware which steals bitcoin wallets. So i wouldn't trust the hackers at all, they are scammers. See http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoi... for more details.
2) The article/the hackers claim that the mt.gox database dump shows that mt.gox should be in control of over 900k bitcoins and that it is an evidence that mt.gox is lying. Well it is evidence that the article/hackers don't understand anything. From the start, mt.gox is saying that because of a transaction malevability bug, their ballances in DB and their balances on their actual accounts were ouf of sync. This is the reason they didn't notice sooner. Their DB was showing everything was ok but in reality, their money was silently siphoned out of their accounts.
3) Karpeles (mt.gox owner) is probably staing silent because his lawayers told him so. Nothing unusual here.

No, because unlike bitcoin, they are not digital, cannot be sent over internet, are not decentralized and can be easily faked.

Oh realy? So paypal is currency? gold, land or houses are currency? I don't think so.

The government also can't counterfeit or print bitcoin, that is one if its main purpose. It's advantage over metal coins is obvious: it can be sent anywhere in the world via internet.

Maybe the pople touting it understand what you obviously don't: bitcoin is much more then currency. Even if it fails as currency, it can be store of value, payment network or some other service which uses proof of work concept.