This is interesting because it relates to one of the problems I have wondered about with Bitcoin for a while. Largely, trust in Bitcoin (at least for me) depends on the idea that "anyone" can (and will) verify a block and hence it is difficult to cheat. But as mining becomes uneconomic for anyone who doesn't have specialised rigs, the number of people who can realistically and economically verify blocks starts to shrink, potentially quite rapidly.

This effect is irrespective of the USD/whatever value of a Bitcoin and of the absolute number of Bitcoins earned in a mining transaction - it's simply about economies of scale in the marginal cost for mining which leads to marginal revenue being below the marginal cost for most people using the currency - ie the gradual appearance of a barrier to entry in mining for smaller players. This in turn magnifies the risk of collusion. Thus as Bitcoin becomes more popular, it also becomes less trustworthy, which is not a property you would ideally want it to have.

In reality I doubt this is likely to be a big problem as most people are willing to trust central banks already, compared to which Bitcoin is always likely to be a least a little bit "better"; but it is an interesting philosophical question.

Actually, those calculations are not entirely useless. Yes there needs to be a verification of signatures and transactions BUT this process also needs to be "hard" to achieve so that I can't just invite six of my friends to immediately verify both double-spend transactions I have just posted. In turn, the fact that these need to be "hard" transactions is why there is an economic incentive to perform them. What's more, you also need the "hard" work to be dependent on the specific ordering of the blockchain so that you can't solve a bunch of it in advance but not share the results until you are ready to send your double-spending transactions to the blockchain. Think of it as similar to (though not the same as) the idea that you want a password hashing function to be slow (have a high number of rounds/good salts/etc) to make brute-force attacks harder.

There are potential alternative scheme which mean the hard work is less "useless" (e.g. protein folding) but I think it's highly likely that these only really work if you have a system with more centralised tracking of the "work" (to produce the path-dependency); at that point, you could simply ask "why not just trust a central authority to verify the transactions in the first place"...

Utter rubbish. Whatever you think about Bitcoin, stability of exchange rate has nothing to do with whether something is a "currency" or not. The Mexican Peso dropped by nearly 50% in less than a week in 1994. The Russian Rouble dropped by 70% in less than 6 months in 1998. Argentina's peso devalued by around 75% in a similarly short space of time in 2002 (including at least a 30% drop overnight). There are lots and lots of examples of rapid currency devaluations throughout history.

I'm also in Europe and in my experience the lifetime of CFLs has been approximately equal to the incandescents they replaced, but the failure pattern is different. Incandescents used to see a bunch failing when we got the first onset of colder weather each winter, with a bunch of bulbs going at roughly the same time; CFLs fail more evenly throughout the year but nonetheless they do fail at about the same average age, I'd guess c.12 months. The failure modes I've seen are that they simply don't start any more, start flickering like mad or just get very dark. No fires or the like.

The other issues with CFLs also all still hold - slow to start, bad colour temperature, and most significantly mislabeling ("100W" equivalent bulbs are reallty more like 50-60W, and the "true" 100W equivalents are much more expensive and difficult to find).

Overall though the impact on our lives has been pretty minimal because we basically avoided using them in areas where we spend long amounts of time. Firstly, we already had halogen bulbs/fittings in some of these areas (using a dimmer halogen still gives a nice quality of light) and secondly where we didn't we now use candles a lot more than we used to. Actually candlelight is nicer even than incandescents used to be so in a weird way it's sort of been a positive.

In the UK, unlike in the US, there is no longer automatic sovereign immunity for the government from suits for contract or tort. However the legislation which governs the intelligence services is so very broadly drawn that I suspect that anything and everything they do is always legal (or, at least, can be authorised ex post facto by a minister without the involvement of parliament or a court and thus made legal). That leaves, perhaps, seeking a judicial review of the authorising minister's decision but I'm not sure how successful you might be there. This is what GCHQ was boasting about in some of the "marketing" slides which were published by the Guardian.

He didn't jump any ticket barrier. The "jumped the ticket barrier" comment was attributed at the time to an eyewitness but it has been alleged that it was in fact one of the police officers involved (and if that's true then it appears consistent with the idea of the Met realising their mistake and trying to smear him through this and other 'off the record' briefings to the press with the aim of making themselves look less incompetent).

Actually, only half the victims could have realised this (at least directly). The websites being spoofed are victims here as well - after all it does your reputation no good at all if someone spoofs your website to serve malware. Best case, you look like an incompetent admin; worst case, someone thinks you did it deliberately and starts telling a lot of their friends. It's akin to a murderer framing an innocent party for his crime - that innocent party is a victim of a crime too. I suspect these agencies have legal immunity unfortunately but if I had proof this had happened to a website I owned, I'd be thinking about what legal redress I could seek.

As an outsider, the political problem with Obamacare is obvious - it simply overpromised massively. Not surprisingly, it turns out that many people will have to pay a bit (and in a large number of cases a lot) more so that other people can pay a lot less and/or get a lot more out of the system - that's just how the maths works out. So Obamacare is, and always was, fundamentally a political deal between generations and between classes about who pays for what - but that was never made clear enough at the time, in my opinion because the Obama administration was far too worried about its short-term poll ratings and was (from what I could tell at the time) obsessed with the law being seen to be "popular" at the time it was passed.

I suspect this is where Romney's and Obama's proposals differed most - in the rhetroric which would have been attached to a Romney-led reform. Because Romney would have been coming from a position of political strength (Democrats would have been in favour of any kind of reform in the direction he proposed), he could have afforded to make the "grand argument" without taking much risk; whereas for Obama the risks were greater, hence he did not.

The problem the administration now have is that because noone was straight about how this would work at the time, a lot of people feel that what is now happening was never the political bargain that was entered in to. As a consequence, they feel that they and their fellow voters (including, crucially, those who were in favour at the time) were taken advantage of. Many of this group would likely have grudgingly supported the actual deal as a case where effectively their "side" was outvoted if it was concluded more openly at the time - but the way the changes were marketed leaves them feeling like the administration lied to people to get the law passed.

This leaves the administration with a problem which cannot be solved in any satisfying way without simply repealing Obamacare and starting again after a fresh election with a fresh president. As this is unlikely to happen I suspect the programme will be unpopular for many years to come and get blamed for all sorts of ills, some of which will be its fault but many of which will not.

I don't think people on their phones mid-flight are likely to be a significant problem in the near future at least. For one thing, you're rather unlikely to get signal at a high altitude unless the airline installs repeaters on the plane (if you fly a lot you might notice every so often on flights that about 5 minutes before landing people suddenly start to receive a lot of texts; that's because they left their phones on by accident but didn't have signal until the plane got lower). And of course you can guarantee if the airlines do that it will be expensive to use, at least for the first few years, and therefore not used very much for calls - how often did you ever see people using AirFones when they were still installed in nearly every seat after all? (though people's phones would still ring with a repeater which could get annoying I suppose).

For another, aeroplanes are actually very noisy environments - it's amazing how quickly the human brain can simply tune that background noise out (which works since it's pretty constant and unchanging noise) - but unless you have something like a jawbone headset, the person on the other end of the call might have a bit of a hard time hearing you so most calls are likely to be pretty short.

I'm not in Australia (I live in the UK) but I have bought a couple of things from ebay sellers who would only ship to the US in the past few years (sadly this seems to be an increasingly common occurence). I've used Shipito for package forwarding for this and would definitelty recommend them - for my sort of low-volume use they worked out cheapest by quite some margin (as they have a plan where they don't charge you a monthly or annual fee, just a higher fee per shipment) and everything has worked out so far exactly as advertised. Although I've not really had any major issues, I've been in contact with their customer support team a couple of times too and that has been a good experience - they respond to emails/online form submissions pretty quickly.

One other tip - more relevant if you're not using a forwarding service though - I've found it's well worth paying for USPS Express rather than USPS Priority Mail for boxes as it's usually not much more money (often in the region of 5%) and is SIGNIFICANTLY quicker - we're talking a difference of 2-3 WEEKS, at least from the US to the UK and in my experience.

Even if all the information were a 100% accurate representation of the actual records and all links were correct, the original records likely contain numerous errors or important omissions; to take the most obvious point, there is likely to be almost no way to verify whether children were legitimate or not. So its usefulness for genetic study seems doubtful to me as many generations later I suspect those sort of effects are difficult to pick up or isolate properly in living people's genes.

What's worse, in some historical periods it would not have been uncommon for some children to be biologically unrelated to either of their legal parents - e.g. lovechild of an affair the man had with a woman who was also sleeping with other men (but who claimed he was the father as he represented the best economic/social prospect of the possibilities), after which the man might take responsibility and raise the child as his own.

Don't worry, the EU isn't about to invade the US in some weird reincarnation of Red Dawn. But they (or individual member states) could do a lot of things which would hurt the US a great deal.

Off the top of my head for example, while still keeping things at least nominally relatively "targeted": (1) economically punish the US: impose import/export tariffs on relevant US goods/services (particularly tech but perhaps also bandwidth/peering etc), make it much much harder for US citizens to get visas to come over here for business, expropriate the EU assets of US companies who have been complicit in this eg Google, Facebook, etc, or even impose full-on trade sanctions e.g. banning EU companies from dealing with US companies in certain sectors (eg ban EU companies from using or buying Cisco gear); (2) withdraw military cooperation and support from the US: close US military bases on EU soil, cancel their (remaining) participation in various joint procurement projects eg the JSF project, immediately withdraw EU-country troops from roles around the world where they are supporting or working alongside US troops, and stop sharing intelligence with the US; (3) diplomatically punish the US, by removing some of their diplomatic staff from the US and expelling some US diplomatic staff from EU countries, stopping cooperation on international treaties such as extradition agreements, ending support for the US in international fora such as the UN etc etc.

Even if it were actually the NSA's job (which you seem to be saying it might be, provided simply that they don't get caught), you're answering the wrong question. Here's a close analogy - in countries that have armed forces, the military's most basic job is to fight and kill other people (whether to advance an invasion of other countries, repel an invasion by another country, or for some other purpose). Does that mean that we have no right to be surprised or outraged if politicians or military commanders tell their troops to kill everyone in a certain category "just in case" they might be troublemakers (even if they made it legal by changing/secretly reinterpreting the law/constitution/regulations)? Of course not. Does it make any difference if "the enemy" is doing the same? No. Neither does it make any difference if they do it in secret and never get found out. The law (of any country or even international law) doesn't even enter into the question. It's simply a moral (and ethical) imperative.

Just because you can do something, does not mean you should do something, and it is especially not a valid excuse when you get caught later. Likewise, just because someone else is doing something, or other people have "always" done something, or someone in authority has told you to do something, doesn't mean you should. I mean, come on, these are basic morals and ethics that small children the world over are taught by their parents.

If something similar had happened in any other agency of government, it would be a scandal and people would be fired (although sadly often not the actual people responsible). In fact, that seems to happen with reassuring regularity, even if the scandal is far less wide-reaching than this one. What is puzzling me is why the normal rules of politics seem not to apply to the UK/USA signals intelligence agencies.

Mostly because they make significant profits from EU-based customers. The EU can easily cut off their access to EU-originated revenues, which is what FB, Google etc really care about. The users are the product, not the customer remember - and this is one of the very very few instances when this can work in users' favour.

I'd add either the (UK, not Australian) Telegraph or (preferably) the Financial Times to that list (much better than the WSJ). Particularly for financial/business stories I almost never read the mainstream press, they are simply awful at reporting these things (usually misunderstanding, missing key details, or over-sensationalising stories as well as over-simplifying - the BBC is particularly bad at this). Bloomberg generally does a decent job most of the time on them and is worth following for that as it's free to read on the web (unlike the FT).

It's also WELL worth picking up a copy of the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, or Foreign Affairs on occasion (as well as The Economist, although that's a bit lighter-weight) - they are not really "real time" but they will give you much more to think about when you are reading the day-to-day news (just be aware that they each have their own institutional biases too).