Bitcoin might be flawed or it might just be that it doesn't fit into a box and therefore most people, including Slashdotters reject it out of hand. What do you think about the $400m+ of venture capital invested in Bitcoin infrastructure in the last 18 months? Obviously not all investors share your convictions about the flaws.

Wow - just because it has "Coin" in the name hasn't stopped the CFTC from calling it a commodity. Somehow, I think their opinion matters more than yours does. And seriously, anyone that thinks that someone who deals in tokens produced by unauthorized entities should be jailed just doesn't understand math. Every self-signed certificate is an "unauthorized" item. Anyone that works with prime numbers creates "unauthorized" work. The same holds true for digital works of art. Troll harder, moron.

Sure, lots of me-too clones have cropped up - however, the vast majority of investors/users aren't fooled. Alt-coins make up less than 10% of the market, all combined. Clearly first mover has a ton of advantage in terms of adoption, investment and developer time.

The reason is this - for 4 years running, it has one of the lowest performance impacts on a running system. Does it catch everything? No, but nothing does. Given that AV is imperfect protection, I might as well have a smoothly running system with minimal protection.

Indeed. There were plenty of redeeming qualities from both of the ST reboots. This brings the level of enjoyment to levels that are just impossible with Episode 1-3 - Jar Jar, annoying kids that accidentally blow up space stations, horrible love stories that no one believes, boring plots about trade embargoes and senate votes, etc, etc. And I assume that everyone agrees that ST V is worse than either of the reboots. The point is that while JJ Abrams may be flawed, we have reason to hope that the product will be far superior to the worst that Star Wars has offered us so far. George Lucas has passed the torch and I'm very happy to see him in the rear view mirror.

Parts of the US government hold that Bitcoin is property, namely the IRS. However, the government certainly counts it as money with regard to money laundering - just ask Charlie Shrem. Agreed that the undercover purchases aren't really official business, however, this is definitely official business: http://www.usmarshals.gov/asse... I don't imagine that the US Marshals are going to sell Bitcoin one day and then on another day have a different branch of the US government say that Bitcoin isn't a valid means of transferring value, legal tender be damned.

Who says Bitcoins aren't legit payment services? They work just fine for the US gov't to buy drugs, to seize and then eventually sell back to the public. http://www.coindesk.com/us-mar...

Well, even the emergency brake on many modern cars is no longer a pure mechanical device. http://www.audi.com/aola/brand... I think that it's safe to say that the manual brake feature is going to require electronic equipment to be functional.

Exactly. Do I have a problem with Big Tobacco? Yes - because they lie about their products and refuse to disclose the ingredients cointained within their products. Otherwise, I have no problem with multinational companies that want to sell tobacco, cocaine or heroine.

The problem is that a trusted device becomes untrusted as soon as you plug it into a computer not 100% in your control. Bring a USB storage device with you to work? To a friend's house? To *shudder* your parent's computer? What prevents a USB storage device, especially a common model, from having it's firmware overwritten? It's all too easy to have malicious code that moves around as firmware, something that it seems isn't checked by typical AV software.

I will ignore the "proper OS" taunt - it shows a lack of perspective, given that Windows is the most popular OS in use today. Every OS has keyboard shortcuts. Could you disable them? Perhaps but that's besides the point - most people won't. Ubuntu - CTRL+ALT+T = terminal OSX - COMMAND+S+terminal = terminal Windows - windowskey+r+cmd = terminal Those commands only cover around 97-99% of the desktop/laptop market share. Think that's not juicy target?

The problem at hand is that you can take a trustworthy device, plug it into an infected computer and then your trustworthy device becomes compromised and not easily detectably so, infecting your formerly clean PC. So far, no comments on mitigating procedures or OS specific circumstances. Most OSes will automatically load USB devices so in theory this could affect just about every OS whereby a compromised phone decides to become a keyboard and starts typing keystrokes and sending data to a 3rd party. Scary, at least in theory.

This. PCI DSS has a tone of requirements, not the least of which is having a basic firewall. Unfortunately it's all too common having vendors who choose the path of least resistance such as requiring domain administrator credentials to run a service or disabling any firewall services simply because they haven't taken the time to learn a proper security mindset. Just because many vendors are clowns doesn't give this particular vendor any excuse. A perfect example - a large financial information provider that will go unnamed installed a service in our data center for pricing. They delivered 3 PCs, 2 switches and 1 router. None of the equipment was redundant and any single component failure took down the entire system. When asked why they didn't offer 2 routers, 2 switches and use failover - they admitted that they just didn't do it that way. Incompetent comes in all sizes - always object when you can.