And as usual, people who trust their Crypto Currency to a web based service (especially one with such a short history to it, and no clearly defined security practices) end up getting their shit stolen. Really now, if you want your crypto coins (be they BTC LTC or whatever) safe keep them in a private wallet and encrypt it, don't load your fortunes onto some website, then complain when they get hacked.
This is kind of like carrying around a giant wad of cash in your pocket and then being mad when someone mugs you, keep a small amount of 'working cash' readily available, and keep the rest of it in a safe place. The same logic that you'd use with real money should apply to virtual money.
Potentially Unwanted Programs are not quite malware, though in many cases I'd argue are worse. PUPs are generally stuff like 'WOMG Awesome Toolbar', 'Internet Coupon Printer 3000', "Free smilies wacky mouse pointers' and Java.
They're legitimate in the sense that they won't exploit vulnerabilities in your system to install themselves, or (generally) ignore (or interfere with) attempts to remove them from your computer. They might even propose to have some sort of functionality that a user could want. The reality is that the functionality they generally offer is limited at best, and may even be inferior to the native functionality of the computer. They often slow your machine down, eating up your CPU cycles, opening up your computer to additional vulnerabilities, stealing your personal information to sell to advertisers, and generally speaking are not really useful to or needed by the people who have them installed on their computers.
Imagine for a moment that a government decided they were going to go and take half of their fiat currency in existence out of the economy, this wouldn't actually mean that there was now less value worth of money in the economy, only that the individual currency denominations are individually worth twice as much as they used to be.
If an entity with the financial capability to buy $4.8 billion worth of BTC went on that much of a buying spree the price of individual BTC would skyrocket, as the demand for the product would rise while the entity was purchasing them. Then, presumably since the goal of this entity is to destroy BTC, they would not reintroduce the coins they'd purchased back into the economy, thus causing a decrease in supply, that would have the ultimate result of simply stabilizing the remaining BTC at their new higher value.
The really stupid thing is that such an "exchange" does not offer "sketchy investments". The "sketchy investment" is the actual Bitcoin. I've seen no sites offer actual interest or anything: they just offer to keep your Bitcoins.
There are sites which offer interest (paid as a % of the exchange's revenue as a way to attract new members). As well as places that offer investments/loans.
While I agree that the best way to safeguard your BTC is with an encrypted private wallet, there are valid reasons to consider storing them online. Granted you should certainly do your research first, and even if everything is on the up and up, accept that there is some risk involved if the site owner turns out to be a sleaze, or doesn't properly secure his servers against hackers etc. If you're adverse to that kind of risk then keep it in your private wallet.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but I will respond to the first point. Adding -San to a name is somewhat similar to saying Mr. but Japanese honorifics tend to be slightly more nuanced than the Mr, and Mrs, style honorifics of English. In japan it's considered very impolite to refer to someone by their given name rather than family name, unless you are very close friends. Likewise it is considered impolite in Japanese to leave off any honorific again unless you are very close friends.
Generally adding -san to a name indicates that the person is someone you do not have a close relationship with, and denotes a respectful tone. Other honorifics commonly used in modern japan include -sama, which would be given to someone you strongly look up to or who is highly above your social station, it's roughly the equivalent of calling someone 'boss' but again is more nuanced and respectful than that, -kun is generally used to refer to someone who is below your social station while still being respectful, it's common that in a work environment for a supervisor to speak to a (generally male) junior with -kun, while the junior would refer to their supervisor with -san, while the president of the company would be -sama. -chan is the last commonly used honorific, and is generally used in similar situations where -kun would be used for females, it's also used to indicate 'cuteness' or for small children. A mascot character might be referred to as Mascot-chan if they're supposed to be cute or childish, and it is common for adults to refer to elementary grade or younger children with -chan.
There's more nuances to Japanese honorifics than I give here, but that's the long and short of it, if you're ever in doubt which honorific would be appropriate to a given situation, generally going with -san is a safe fall back.
I don't think all advertisers are inherently malicious. There are some sure, but then there are some crooked cops, some sleazy salesmen, corrupt politicians etc. The problem comes in that most of the time we see advertisements on the internet its because there really is no other way for the company to provide the services they provide unless someone is footing the bill. Would you use Google search if you had to pay for it? Some people might, but I'd be willing to bet that most people wouldn't. Using AD blockers is the digital equivalent of saying "I want to use your service but I don't think it's good enough to to pay for it".
Now I might sound a little hypocritical, since I do have an ad blocker installed myself, but when I regularly visit a website that I know makes it's money off of ads I'll usually disable it. And I have been known to spring for 'premium' accounts occasionally (which usually ditch the ads) for services I use a lot, so maybe I am a bit of a hypocrite for not wanting to pay for the hosting of 'Joe and Jim's Spam blog' that I happened to visit once when just surfing around the net, but for sites that I visit Daily, I usually have no problem with a couple tasteful ads that don't significantly detract from the content of the page.
Actually it wasn't designed to do that, it was designed to be a charger + serial data connection, exactly like microUSB. Someone else on here helpfully linked to this article which I found interesting. (apologies to whoever originally linked it, the article stuck in my mind, not the poster). If you read the article it tears down a lightning to HDMI video adapter, and notes that it has an ARM processor in it, something that would be unneeded if the cable itself was capable of spitting out straight HDMI video.
TL;DR Lightning cables have that nifty 'can be plugged in either way' thing going for them, and are arguably more durable than microUSB, but at the end of the day they're two specs, and two connectors doing exactly the same thing, if you want to snag a video feed from either of them, you need to have a 'dongle' that can capture and process the data pins on the connector into a proper video signal.
With your bare hands?!?