>Though it sounds like the current bubble is being driven by
>Chinese evading their government's currency controls, which I
>gather could be stopped at any moment by the Chinese
>government. Presumably when that happens it will be the first big >crash of bitcoin.

This is a very intersting point of view. Living in a country with a non convertible money, and where it's somehow difficult to buy officially convertible currency (Dollar, Euro etc.) while not so difficult in the black market. I have always thought that Bitcoin is a very intersting and convenient way to transfer money abroad in an electronic and anonymous way and at a very low rates. So maybe Bitcoin will be tight in the future, to a certain degree, to mony transfer regulations in countries with non convertible or with special regulations money like China, India, Brasil etc. and most thirld word countries.

>A likely cause of this drug resistance is use of antibiotics to increase growth rate in livestock

>To follow your profit motive, most of the antibiotics in the US, 80%, are sold for agriculture.

Yes and this a real catastrophe, the US are still one of the rare countries allowing the use of antiobiotics in agriculture while other major countries have disallowed them.

Here is one http://www.gekgasifier.com/ an open source gasifier and electric generator of 20Kw

Open source everything and crowdsource manufacturing and distribution of goods :) this is undoubtedly the future; though we will be limited by energy costs and raw material. We are heading to The Abundance Society.

This is not special to America, in France where I live, medical studies are being severely subject to quota, the result is that the country must now import doctors from other parts of the world, especially Africa, the Middle east and Eastern Europe, when there's lots of unemployment in other fields, and while the country has perfectly all the abilities to train its own doctors. In the same time, those parts of the world are badly missing those migrating doctors.

Yes the Allwinner seems to be a real game changer. Those guys : http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/news/ are building an open hardware platform similar to the Raspberry PI and based on the Allwinner A10, if I remember well it's price will be around $25, while it's much more powerfull. There have already been some articles here on Slashdot about it.

Or you can generate liquid fuels (methanol, ethanol, gasoline, diesel) using Fischer and Tropsch style reactions which has been making a lot of progress lately. It's a better way to transport hydrogene.

The value of Bitcoin is in "eyeballs", when people read articles about it and hear about it, it automatically adds to it's value. It's exactly like ads, and in the case of bitcoin every press is "good" press, this why it's here to stay.

Yes this is exactly what I tought, here we go again, what's next ? bankrupcy like SCO. So bad for this ex-glory !

Thanks for mentionnong this. There is a book by a renowed french economist and demograph, wich talks exactly about this subject; it's "Apres l'Empire" of 'After the Empire' by Emmanuel Todd, a very intersting read, where he explains that the main role of the US Army is the protection of the US Dollar as the global currency.

No, this is not a coincidence, it means that fennel is sufficiently rare in english speaking countries, that at least a certain number of people will try to figure out, what vegetable is it, exactly as the author did. So his situation was not unique. I have encountered many situations where many people where asking the same questions as I did and looking for it in the web.

More precisely it's a Semantic network : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network

The problems is that all those patents are "functional patents", that means that they patent a function not a mean or a method to do it; those are in fact just ideas. As long as the patent office continue to accept such kind of patents without asking for the mean or the algorithm to do it, very obvious and broard patents will continue to split thorough the system. Some people are pushing to halt this but as long as the situation continues this way the software industry is in big trouble.

The Wintel duopoly is completly finished, the future is a clear highway towards HTML 5, Tablets and smartphones, it's just a matter of time, everything will move to the web and the cloud.

I am glad there are still posts like that on Slashdot, that's why I have been lurking here for so long :). I believe that epistemology : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology is the most important field in philosophy (or science) and needs to be more activly tought in colleges and universities.