Worth remembering that some Bitcoins (perhaps many) will have been 'lost'. I had the Bitcoin wallet software on my mobile phone, with perhaps 20BTC in it (this was when the exchange rate was c. $4); my four year old daughter fell into the swimming pool, and I didn't think to remove the phone from my pocket. If anyone knows a way to remove the wallet.dat file from a broken Galaxy Note, I would be interested to hear.

Also, there will be some people who have lost the passwords for their wallets.dat, and are therefore unable to access their funds. Of course, in 20 years time they'll be able to decrypt them, but for now they're out of luck.

Reading through the entire comment stream here I catch a very simple misunderstanding about the patent system. Simply put, patents do not exist to protect the inventor. This is a misunderstanding, and is the result or erroneous extrapolation from copyright law.

Patents exist to encourage innovation. They accept that certain time-limited monopolies are allowable because they encourage investment in research and development that would not otherwise exist.

Or to put it another way: the law does not exist to benefit companies, it exists to benefit the consumer by ensuring maximum competition, with the proviso that in certain - exceptional - circumstances, there will be greater innovation if certain people may have a time-limited monopoly of production.

This is a mistake Steve Jobs and others make. (Innovators feel that the law should protect their innovations because that benefits them. But the law exists to benefit the greatest number of people, and that means patents should be granted rarely and narrowly.)

In the case of the iPhone, it is by no means clear that preventing Samsung from putting their icons in a grid, or producing a product with rounded corners is protecting R&D. Apple has become the largest (by market capitalisation) and most successful company in history *without* having previously relied on patent protection. Would consumers benefit from there being fewer makers of smartphones.

Let me drift back to the invention of the motor car: would it have benefited consumers if every innovation, such as the layout of brake, accerlerator, clutch, was patent-able?

Err: this is an x86 Atom. Of course, it's running Android, so good luck getting your x86 binaries on there...

For the average user, fragmentation does not exist as a problem. It's like asking a Dell user; tell me, do you think the PC ecosystem is weakened by the system where you can buy an HP with a 17" screen or an Acer with a 21" one? Aren't you worried about fragmentation of the PC ecosystem?

Said user would look at you as if you were completely mad.

For the average, user the word fragmentation means nothing. Really, absolutely nothing.

There is an issue for developers, but even there the problems is relatively modest. Everyone writes to the Android specs of 2-3 years ago (mostly Gingerbread), and the world continues as normal.

And, the crazy bit is, of the top 100 apps, 98 are cross-platform anyway. Dropbox? Check. Angry Birds? Check. Evernote? Check. Every serious developer is already designing for both Android and iOS anyway (would anyone seriously consider building a mobile app designed to only ever being on one platform?), which means that any developer is already thinking about multiple form factors and resolution.

So: to finish, fragmentation is a wonderful phrase dreamt up by the depatment of FUD, but it bears about as much relevance to the real world as Elmer Fudd.

Ummm: also it was a THIRTY BILLION DOLLAR fraud. And they defrauded charities and schools as well as rich people.

It's pretty hard to ignore something of that size.

Also +1 for PythonAnywhere.

In every US region, peak electricity usage is in the summer. In every Canadian state, it's in the winter.

Pounds and pence, I'm afraid - you've exaggerated the value of ITV by a solid 100x (or 60x if we assume that you were thinking its value was quoted in dollars).

ITV has a market capitalisation of £3.2m and negligable net debt. So, an enterprise value of - say - $5bn. And they do Downton Abbey.

I'm sorry - your numbers are *way* high for the Intel server. If you use a Mac Mini, headless, then you'll be at 0.01kw/h when idle, peaking at 0.085kw/h at max. Given any regular server will spend 90%+ of its time idle, then your true Intel number is probably $10-15.

Any server you build yourself will have similar power characteristics to the Mac Mini.

You should still go for ARM, because it's more fun, but don't fool yourself into thinking you'll be saving money.

I'm sorry, this is simply not true.

Both ARM and Intel are hostages to their history.

If ARM is to produce a chip that is competitive with Intel in desktop applications, then it will need to (a) improve its performance at native multi-tasking, (b) improve its FPU, (c) develope hyperthreading, out-of-order execution, speculative branchong, (d) add support for things such as virtualisation extensions.

Can it do these things? Yes, of course it can. Can it do these things without adding complexity and transistors? No, it cannot. ARM can become compeititive with Intel in desktop, but only by becoming more like Intel. Those extra transistors? They add die size (i.e. cost), and they add drain (i.e., reduce battery life).

Now Intel, can it produce a super low power chip, running the x86 instruction set, that is usable in smartphones, etc? Yes, but if it wants to do this, it will have to shred transistors, and shredding transistors means shedding performance and features. In other words, it will no longer offer any specific performance advantages.

It is *possible* that Intel's process technology lead means that it can produce a competitve mobile chip before ARM produces a competitive laptop/desktop chip. But it's also largely a moot point. Unless there is a compelling reason for handset manufacturers to choose Intel, then it will be an irrelevent share of the market.

The same is true for Windows 8 on ARM. No legacy software support, and no meaningful cost advantage (Intel Atoms start at $20/chip, about the same as a Tegra 2.) Plus, of course, the architecture of the box around ARM (on the PC side) is not set in place yet.

Unless something very surprising happens, we will see ARM taking overall share, because smartphones and tablets are growing as a percentage of the computing market, at the expense of desktops and laptops. But it is unlikely that ARM will take a meaningful share of the PC market or Intel of the smartphone one.

Well: there's a surprise. Summary says: Tesla announces business model has failed and bankrupcy imminent.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Tesla's stock is up in an down market. The company is trading comfortably above its six month average price. The company, IIRC, always said that there would only be 2,500 Roadsters made...

Next year, the Model S will launch. The company has thousands of preorders, with people having put real money down.

The Model S may, of course, fail miserably. But the absurd FUD in the summary is ridiculous.

I too loved my N900 - a genuinely remarkable phone. I'm using an HTC Sensation now, which is wonderful is some ways, but I will always love the N900.

No: you don't get it.

A Ponzi scheme involves earlier investors being paid by later investors.

The whole point of bitcoins is that their number is mathematically limited. They may - or may not - have value depending on whether people attribute value to them. Their number increases, but slowly (the very opposite of a Ponzi scheme).

In a Ponzi scheme, a central promoter tells people their investment is worth x. On the contrary, with Bitcoins, the only value they have is what someone else will pay for them. And the fact that their number is mathematically limited means people *may* attribute value to them.

Now: there is clearly a demand for a currency which allows electronic, anonymous transfers. And there is clearly demand for a currency, where the government cannot devalue its real worth by printing as many as they want.

But, there is a corollary. And that is that, unbacked by the government, and being basically illiquid, you are making an enormous bet that other people will in the future choose to attribute a value to a very large number.

I am much, much less sceptical of bitcoins than many on here. But that does not mean I own any. I'm not that brave...

Bitcoins may well be worthless, but they are in no respect a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes have to grow geometrically to continue in existence, which is why they quickly get destroyed after a few iterations. Bitcoins in circulation, on the other hand, grow at an increasingly slow pace. Similarly, Ponzi schemes have a 'promoter'.

The whole purpose of the bitcoin ecosystem is that it is something electronically transferrable (anonymously), yet fundamentally limited in its number.

Now: they could easily be a complete fraud - with the number of bitcoins in circulation being far more than claimed. However, if the claims for the limitation of their number in circulation are true, then they could easily become a store of value, in that any fiat currency (or indeed gold itself), has value because choose to believe it.

Or to put it another way: if people wish to assign bitcoins value, they can. Likewise, they can choose not to.

In fact, it would be very simple: he'd say "hmmmm... I wonder if there's any other way to get lower power consumption PCs, that continue to run all the existing software, and don't require new skills, and which run on proven technology. hang on! there's this Atom chip, x86 compatible with a TDP of c. 10Watts! I can achieve 95% of the savings without betting my career on unproven technology that might be ditched by Microsoft down the line. (As they did with Windows support for DEC Alpha, for example)"