Looks like "RTFT - Read The F*cking Title" needs to become the new baseline around here.

"I thought it sounded crazy until he told me the list of famous billionaires who have invested in the company." "Then I realized it was actually a money laundering scheme."

I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I love my Q10. I'm an annoyance to my peers. Every time they launch into a rant about some issue they're having with their iPhone, I listen respectfully for however long it takes them to fizzle out, and then I just pull out the Q10, and while starting to check my messages, I just casually say "I think you already know what my solution to that issue is". I gave up trying to sell people on it a long time ago, and I also gave up trying to help people work around their iPhone problems years ago. I use my phone for work and personal stuff, and I work *a lot*, and I commute several hours a day. So I need something that always just works unobtrusively. I dunno what I'm going to do once BlackBerry is gone, and nobody makes a decent phone with a physical keyboard, decent security, decent battery life (with a self replaceable battery), decent stability, non-proprietary connectors, non-proprietary hot-swappable storage media support, decent corporate VPN integration support, seamless Exchange server integration...etc.

The summary says "had increased from 40 million to 70 million", but the title of this post says 110 million. I note that 40 + 70 = 110, so I think somebody parsed it wrong.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds ) Classify this one under "Those Who Fail to Learn from History Are Doomed to Repeat It".

Summary is spot on: Obviously, patents exist "so that companies can concentrate on true development which benefits all their users". An individual with a patent? Yeah, right...

You should offer to edit it for him then, because this article is otherwise excellent. I admit I've only read about 30% of it so far, but I'll be reading the rest soon.

I have to admit, seeing their setup, the first thing I thought they would do is make somebody jump, and take the shot while they're at the apex of the jump.

I guess I missed the happy, joyous part then. I watched the first hour and 20-some-odd minutes of this hearing, and if I had taken a drink every time they said "child pornography", I would be in the hospital now.

Sorry, that should be 1532, the numbers have changed since they first announced they were doing this. I guess they miscounted initially. Now they're up to 1331 spent and 202 unused, depending on who's numbers you're reading.

...1512 to go. Watching this from my armchair on the west coast of North America, I can't help but feel extremely nervous about all this.

Geez, again in the same set of comments? I mined 0.05 BTC with a Radeon HD 7870 over the last 30 days in the off hours when I'm not using it to play games/watch videos on this machine. My monthly electricity bill since I started mining has increased by around $6 USD/month. 0.05 BTC is exchangeable for $18 USD as I type this. I agree that the revenue vs. electricity vs. difficulty level is getting closer and closer to parity for those mining with GPUs on home computers, but we're still not there. When, based on my own math and experience, it becomes unprofitable for me to be mining as I currently am, I will stop.

Yes, sorry for the lack of clarity in my post. I have been mining with a worker in a BTCGuild pool, using a cgminer client, and powering it with a Radeon HD 7870 card.

Who me? I dunno about that. I suppose you could be right, but my point was that people were saying that the mining wasn't worth the processing power and electricity a few months ago, over 3 years into the introduction of Bitcoin, and I found that to be completely false in my personal experience. I'm still mining now, and the value proposition is getting to be more questionable. I'm only mining about $0.05 BTC a month, or around $17 USD at current rates, for my $6 in electricity and wear-and-tear on my computer equipment. But the inflammatory statement that it "seems pretty stupid" is what gets me. As long as I can use those BTC to buy stuff that adds up to more in dollars than I seem to be spending to mine it, I'll keep going. Sure, at some point mining probably won't make sense, but it's not as if you can't simply go on an exchange and trade you inflating-to-no-value dollars for (maybe by then) stable BTC. Then again, I keep $160 trillion dollars in Zimbabwe bills pinned to the wall above my computer monitor as a constant reminder of the fictitious nature of artificial money...

I don't know about right now, but a few months ago people were saying it was stupid too, but I bought a new $200 video card for my machine and decided to try mining. It took me about a month, and a $6 increase in my monthly electricity bill to mine one bitcoin. I just exchanged that bitcoin for $350 yesterday, so...I don't feel particularly stupid right now. Otherwise, the small handful of bitcoins I acquired the first month that bitcoin started are still in my wallet, so this "all your bitcoins are belong to us" statement is pure FUD. Sure, if the Feds are going to torture the Dread Pirate Roberts for weeks to get him to cough up his wallet password, things like that are bound to happen, but all the other garbage people keep spouting about Bitcoin is silly, IMHO.