"Burst" does not really describe the phenomenon. Before the run-up in value, some weeks ago, 1 BTC was trading at around $100. Now that the value has "collapsed", it is trading at around $600.

In marketing, there are well-known positioning areas:

• "more (goods/services) for more (money)" -- i.e. a premium service
• "more for the same" and "more for less"
• "the same for less"
• "less for (a lot) less

Non-starters are "the same for the same" and "the same for more", because these give customers no added value to their existing service. However, Canada Post has gone even farther by proposing "less for more", which can only work when there are no other options available. By offering less service, and charging more for it, Canada Post is *guaranteeing* that customers will seek other options where they are available. And in the age of the Internet, other options are available.

On the bright side, the Green Party must be pretty pleased. Canada Post's brilliant marketing strategy will save trees by causing snail mail usage not only to continue shrinking, but to plummet.

Today, as far as the layman's understanding goes, we *are* living in a world with magic. I hear "electricity", and have a vague idea of the relationship between electricity and magnetism (another magical force), but my understanding only goes so deep. However, I flip a switch, expecting light, and it magically appears. How is this different from the hero in a fantasy novel who uses his magic wand to light his way? Neither of us is filled with a sense of awe, because it's something we use every day. We just say "electricity" instead of "magic flux".

When I first learned of Clarke's axiom, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", I was thinking about some far-off future, but I have come to realize that a lot of technology is, for many, advanced enough *today* that it might as well be magic.

I agree that the one "game" I played didn't keep me enthralled once the novelty wore off, but it seems to me that there is the *seed* of something that could be fun, for given definitions of "fun". For example, suppose that these games were games-within-a-game, which one could play to win points or "gold" to use in the larger game. Consider it a form of grinding.

I thought that one of the things that made something a "science" was that it could be falsifiable. However, when so-called researchers refuse to try to find alternative explanations for a prevailing theory, it seems to me that they are more intent on building a cathedral than on discovering the truth. If the researchers are self-funded, then what they do is their business, but if they are dependent on the public purse, then they cannot thumb their noses at their paymasters and still expected to be paid.

I might be over-pessimistic, but I predict that the IT will fail disastrously.

I read somewhere that there are 3 million lines of code holding this together. If that's true, then it will take months for the new guys just to understand it. Then, bug-fixing is going to introduce more bugs. Ultimately, everything will be scrapped in order to start over. (Of course by then a private company would have gone out of business, but we are talking about the limitless resources of the federal government.)

Purportedly, one of the reason that legacy systems persist is that it is literally impossible to replace them. Some googling will show a number of expensive failed government IT projects. This one may be one of the most visible, however.

The great thing about this explanation, if it is accepted, is that henceforth the data will no longer matter! Any and all deviations from whatever new climate models are made will be waved away by saying that the warm stuff went down into the layers somewhere. Nevermind that no one has explained why the temperature rise before 2000 did not go there also. Science is wonderful when you don't have to prove anything.

Nice rant. We have all heard of cases where someone was caught "making stuff up" to support some research paper, but in the cases I know of it was only one person acting alone. I wonder if there are proven cases of groups of scientists who knowingly manipulate, or outright invent, data to suit their purposes. While some might be saying that the AGW crowd are doing this, it seems to me that at worst they can only be accused of misapplying statistics, or making unwarranted extrapolations, rather than outright, intentional, fraud.

Can we agree in future not to post news items having to do with climate "science" unless we are at the same time including links to debunkers of said news?

It's obvious to everyone that the wheels have come off this particular scam. Obvious to everyone, that is, except to those whose livelihood depends on them continuing to find new ways of makinjg hockey sticks.

If documentation were free, then implementing all the suggestions would not be an issue. In the real world, however, time and resources are always constrained, so documentation is a balancing act between utility and achievability. Moreover, for a company whose revenue depends on service contracts, it might not be in the company's best interests to eliminate client confusion with better documentation. I vaguely recall some story about Bill Gates who objected to having (I think) docx structured in a way that would allow a person to modify it by hand because it would loosen Word's grip. In other words, complexity and opacity can align with corporate interests.

There is another problem with spending a lot of resources to produce great documentation, however, and that is that as the software being documented evolves, the original documentation becomes less and less valuable. Although the original documentation might win awards for clarity and usefulness, it might be close to useless in only a few years, and nothing but another herculean effort will suffice to update it. This might be worthwhile where millions of customers are involved, but for a user base of only thousands or tens of thousands, great documentation that is also current can eat up profits.

I agree that anonymity, including anonymity when meeting with journalists, is by far the most prudent course of action. What Manning and Snowden have both done by revealing themselves is shift the news away from the excesses of the American government and on to the leakers.

For my part, I think that both of them did a great service to Americans, and innocent citizens of other countries who had been unaware of the extent of government overreach. Their motives, as far as I am concerned, are irrelevant.

This is another example of how the criminalization of vice does more harm than the vice itself. When prostitutes can conduct their business in safe environments, with the same legal protections that apply to any business, this kind of atrocity cannot occur.

Reading between the lines, my guess is that many students thought an online course "inferior" to regular classes, and therefore okay to slack off when doing. Time, however, or time management, may be more the enemy than actual course matter.

I know a high school student who takes online school courses, and one of the ongoing problems for the parents is getting the student to understand that there are X modules to do and only Y days to do them in. Dividing X by Y means that every two or three days something must be completed and sent in for marking. If this requirement is difficult for a high school student to follow without parental hectoring, then it is entirely understandable that kids only a couple years older, who no longer have their parents to help keep them on track, are going to run into problems.

That's as may be, but it seems to me that the border, on both sides, is a kind of "no man's land", where the usual civil liberties don't apply. When US border agents have the authority to arbitrarily deny you admission to the US for years, it seems to me that refusing a "request" can be a high-risk game for the uninformed.