If software patents were taken to their literal full extent, I'd lose my job anyway, because it's impossible to create any substantial piece of software without infringing multiple patents.

Developing new software would become so expensive - what with the cost of having a patent lawyer stand over your shoulder demanding explanations of everything you implemented, and the cost of licensing anything I infringed, or re-implementing things to infringe something else cheaper to license - that the market for my skills would shrink considerably.

Happily I live in a country that is so far in the grey area as to whether it recognises the validity of software patents, and I work for a government agency that has decided to license it's output with a BSD-style license (presumably so the corporate chums of the political bosses can make as much money as they'd like from our taxpayer-funded work...)

People who don't leave adequate braking distance and accelerate as hard as possible are the reason most of the traffic jams on my morning route occur. A single light touch on the brakes gets magnified into a ripple of progressively more urgent braking until you have traffic that grinds to a stop - no obstruction required. A few large gaps help to absorb this kind of thing and would keep the traffic flowing, but the few people who seem to think that tailgating people at beyond the speed limit until they give way and let the guy overtake you - so he can do the same thing to the next guy in the fast lane going the same speed - is acceptable make everyone else so paranoid that they are missing out on a particular piece of road that hardly anyone is willing to leave any space.

If everyone drove with a little more room, then the traffic wouldn't jam up so much, and paradoxically, people would get to their destination faster. The tailgaters are just spoiling their own driving party.

Flip it around ; the implication is that women aren't expected to pay because they aren't able to, because they are either incapable of earning money, or not entitled to hold their own finances.

"Other people are expected to support me" IS insulting. Women who exploit their feminine wiles to get guys to pay for stuff ; well, there's another less charitable name for that kind of behaviour. "Gigolo" is probably more reviled than "whore" because of the implication that men should be the breadwinner - and that men depending on the resources of women is somehow worse than vice-versa.

I do sometimes treat my date, but only once I've had the conversation - my opinion is that remuneration is so out of whack with your actual working effort these days that I don't feel guilty about being well paid OR paying for dinner because I can afford it more than some of the women I date. But it's important, especially in the region I live where standing on your own two feet is a matter of pride, that you don't insult someone when doing so.

They think that the relatives of the victims have some twisted sense of justice that requires the murderer to suffer during his execution. It's vengeful and distinctly anti-Christian, even if the inhabitants of the USA typically like to paint themselves as good Christians.

I'd rather people weren't executed at all, but if you have to do it, at least do it in line with your constitutional and religious values, people.

An ex-politician did the research for a BBC documentary - there is a simple, easy method of execution, used to humanely kill pigs in abattoirs, it's cheap, quick and requires no exotic chemicals. Asphyxia with nitrogen.

He asked several people involved in administering the death penalty if they would consider it, and to a man, they all refused to condone the notion. Because the victim feels a few moments of euphoria before they go.

They *want* the pain and suffering, despite the prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" in the Constitution. The protocols are explicitly designed to be inhumane, and there is a tacit agreement amongst all those involved that they should stay that way.

I suspect the Linux builds of Skype don't have all the good audio codecs they've added to the Windows build, Skype now being a Microsoft product. The audio quality is total ass.

Bitcoin is a service, not a commodity.

It's a big transaction log. When you spend them, you provide the service of signing your transaction with a private key that the network agrees controls the pool of coins from which are spending. You are exchanging this service for the goods and services the recipient of that transaction agreed to provide you with (hopefully).

In the end the only value of a wallet is the ability to provide this service. That's why when a wallet is destroyed those coins it controlled are lost to the network forever.

"Real" currencies are essentially also this kind of service, since we moved off the gold standard. The only value fiat currency has is what someone will agree to give you in exchange for providing the service of telling your bank to move some numbers to their account (whether you do this electronically, or indirectly through cash).

The main differential is that Bitcoin is founded on the mutual trust of all participants, whereas fiat currencies are founded almost entirely on confidence in a few entities - the government, and the banks. Bitcoin probably wins on that count.

The difficulty here is that there is no way to repudiate transactions after the fact - unlike with a bank, there is no "Undo". But this is also a feature. To provide an ability to do this would require a central body to have key escrow of your wallet keys, which would completely undermine the whole network AND be a rich target for exactly this sort of theft.

The problem is that people don't understand Bitcoin. Trusting a web-wallet is an entirely different proposition to trusting a bank, but they are used to thinking about it as if it was a bank.

Why people *ever* used them is beyond comprehension.

You don't even need a server online to *accept* bitcoin transactions, because they occur in the transaction log, so if you pay for hosted mining, or accept payments for cookies, or whatever, you can do it entirely safely just by directing coins to a wallet that has no online keys. You can even check balances without the private key ; wallet balances are public like everything else in the transaciton log.

You only need access to the keys in a wallet to *spend* Bitcoin. So you keep the key in dead storage unless you need to spend.

If you really need a convenient way to spend, keep a "current account" wallet which you recharge from your "deposit account" wallet. Then even if your phone / exchange wallet / usb stick is stolen, you only get a small balance stolen.

It's not the number of coins that's the problem ; they are divisible to a large number of decimal places, enough to cover most projected future needs.

The main problem is the capacity of the network as currently implemented to handle transactions, which can't scale : straight from the horses mouth

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Sca...

There aren't any coins to move. The coins are just an idea. Bitcoin is a large distributed transaction log.

Now, you could make it illegal to exchange Bitcoin transaction services for fiat currency, but that won't stop people still using them as a proxy for value. And I imagine it would be hard to do in a way that actually has legal teeth, but doesn't outlaw all forms of banking (which is mostly providing transaction services these days...)

They provide a service - they hold crypto keys for you and generate transactions signed by those keys.

Now those keys were stolen, but they are of intangible value. Just because certain parties will honour those transactions and exchange the service of providing them for official government scrip, doesn't mean they are worth anything.

Bitcoin is a big distributed transaction log. The record of where all the coins are is public, and verified constantly by clients participating in the network ; each client has a full copy of the transaction log.

Your wallet doesn't store the coins. It stores crypto keys. The coins are all out there - the transaction log says who they belong to, and the private key in your wallet lets you create new transactions to move them around.

When coins are created, the network attests that the coins belong to your wallet by signing the transaction that creates those coins.

To spend those coins requires a transaction record signed by the private key belonging to that wallet. The transaction basically says

"Hey, I'm and I'm transferring coins to " [Signed, wallet-1234]

The network verifies that the signature is correct and adds its own attestation that it is so.

So what happened here was the thieves broke into the server, and accessed private keys that were available to the server, and used them to generate transactions moving the coins they controlled to new wallets (presumably controlled by the thieves).

Tinfoil hat says that it could very well be an inside job (as could MtGox).

I've tried most of the diff / merge tools available but I keep coming back to Beyond Compare ; it's one of the few pieces of commercial productivity software on my machines (both Windows and Linux).

There are a couple of features (like kdiff3's "alignment hint file" feature) that I wish it would adopt, but otherwise it knocks most of the others, freeware and FOSS, into a cocked hat.

Why not GnuWin32 - it too operates in a standard DOS shell but doesn't cost money (unlike MKS Toolkit)?

Having encountered the MKS version of a CVS / issue tracking server (written in Java, crashes when you check out too many files), I'd rather not touch any of their other products.

Well, for this example, yes.

Diamonds are pretty worthless. Their price is artificially inflated by the De Beers cartel. If you don't believe me, try selling a diamond - take your wife's engagement ring down to the jeweller and get a quote. Now compare the price to that of similar stones available in the same store.

So, nothing to do with the robbery though - the diamonds are still worthless beforehand.