When it turns into a Red Super Giant. But, before that, the earth will certainly get smacked by an asteroid when Bruce WIllis ain't lookin'.

ANYWAY... I took my 4.5gph Pietenpol Air Camper for a joy flight over the weekend and had a great time doing it. Didn't even think twice about buying carbon credits to offset the fuel burn. Shocking, ain't it?

So, what's the difference between bitcoin and, say, shells on the beach?

Really, look here: I've got a pocketful of pretty shells. I say they're worth something, you agree, we have adopted this as a currency, I give you shells, you give me bread. You give me shells, I give you milk.

Fine.

It's the same with paper dollars. I work at my desk doing "useful things," my boss signs my paper paycheck, and some electrons are transferred to a harddrive at my bank, I take my plastic card to the grocery store to buy bread and milk, I transfer some of the electrons sitting at my bank into the grocers harddrive sitting in his bank. I eat, he eats, we're happy.

So, what's wrong with the currency we already have? I have 200,000-300,000 CPUs at my disposal (I work for the government so really, I do). What's to stop me (or any government agency or OMG, GOOGLE!!) from "mining" BC, flooding the system by giving them away, and devaluating the currency?

My work here is done.

I'm going to go collect some shells on the beach.

"I reject your religion, and substitute my own."

"The full precipitating causes may never be known, but one February night in 1970 a McDonald Observatory employee (not a Texan, but an Ohioan newly hired from another observatory!) suffered a breakdown and carried a pistol to the observing floor of the 107-inch telescope. He fired a shot at his supervisor, and then unloaded the rest of the clip into the primary mirror. Happily, fused silica is more resilent than ordinary glass, and the big mirror did not break. The craters have been bored out and painted black to reduce any light-scattering effect, and the end result is simply a slight reduction in the efficiency of the telescope. It is now the equivalent of a 106-inch telescope. The incident made the national television news..."

Taken from http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/telescopes/mcdonald.html

Only if you wear a lone wolf t-shirt while using your iphone...

"In their benchmarking, EXT4 and XFS performed, as impressively as each other."

Welcome to 2001, subby. Glad you could make it this decade.

I completely understand them not jumping to XFS, though. I'd never want to convert exabytes of data from one FS to another.