His name is Bob, he lives down the street from me.

Voting power is determined by how many processor cycles you're dedicating to mining the next block, it's not a 'how many coins do I have' or a 'one vote per one voice' kind of system, it's a 'how much am I actively contributing to the system as a whole'.

On a slight tangent, I can't help but think that it'd be interesting to see a democratic political system where the amount of contribution you make to the good of society affected how much influence you had on the political process. Course I don't realistically see such a thing as workable on a national scale. Just food for thought I guess.

If so, let me be the first to say I welcome our new martian overlords. Just please don't be the wussy kind of martians that die easilyto earth's microbial organisms.

No, one is physical hardware and one is software but they will both eventually become obsolete. At some point you have to say enough is enough. Sure you CAN continue to support and fix and patch things that are 'obsolete' by modern standards, but you have to ask why bother? Sure you CAN fix up a 1989 dodge stratus when it breaks and make it work again, but the parts are likely hard to come by, expensive, and the car isn't exactly a classic or otherwise valuable, so the question becomes is it worth it?

I know I'm over simplifying things here, but if someone wanted to 'release' lost bitcoins, they'd need the wallet file, in which case they'd no longer be lost. The wallet could be encrypted, but that's not really a lost wallet so much as a wallet locked up inside a safe that you don't know where the key is for. When bit coins are 'sent' what's really done is they are signed with a public key that matches the private key in your wallet file. For them to travel onto somewhere else you have to process them with your private key and resign them with the public key of where they're going next. Given current cryptographic complexities, the processing power to crack 'unspent' bitcoins would be so high, that it would be financially more profitable to devote those resources to mining new coins than to 'steal' them.

It will be a long time until BitCoin reaches the maximum number of coins in circulation, specifically around 2140, and at the time, the number of bitcoins will be approximately 21 million. Since each bitcoin is currently divisible up to 8 decimal places, that means that when those last bitcoins are mined, there will be about 2.1 quadrillion individually accountable units of bitcoin currency available for use. That means that there is a controlled inflation value until 2140, and only after that point would deflation be inevitable. If we're still using bitcoins in 2135 or whenever that becomes a serious concern I'm sure some enterprising fellow will create a bitcoin clone, and encourage users to switch (which they will if they realize their money can only depreciate in value).

Considering the gross world product for 2011 was just about $79 trillion USD, (or if we include the currently smallest common division of US currency in our calculations, the penny, we have aproximately 7.9 quadrillion individual units of currency) I think the number of potential bitcoins is plenty to compete with any other world currency. Especially since although the GDP figures above are listed in USD, the actual distribution of GDP is in USD, CAD, Euros, Yen, and whatever other currencies you can think of.

My gut feeling is that the 'badass' code is probably either legacy settings they intended to include but decided not to for whatever reason, or it is a feature that they were going to unlock at some point in the future. I doubt that they included that setting specifically for moders, it's likely that moders just happened to be the ones who discovered it.

This is all I have to say on the subject of more Star Wars films.

Most ISPs in the US provide an e-mail address with them. I suppose you don't have to check it regularly, but as with any business type relationship, it's probably a good idea to at least pay some cursory attention to alerts and things (besides advertising crap) that they send you, and e-mail is (to me anyways) preferable than actual mail.

I can think of a few, say for example you are a delivery driver for a local pizza place. Now you need to get in touch with the customer while on the road for some reason (maybe you're not sure where their address is because it was misentered by the person taking the order, or maybe the customer isn't answering their door despite your knocking, or they happen to be in an apartment complex that won't let you inside without a key and doesn't have a door buzzer. A quick phone call could alleviate all of those problems, but it's unlikely that you'd use a company phone for that task, you'd likely use your own cell phone. Well, do you necessarily want some random stranger to know your cell number?

By requiring all TVs to use one of our new Freedom Choice cable boxes we can provide a better over all customer experience, features such as our on screen channel guide can now be utilized on all your TVs. Think of it as an upgrade for your TV.

Sincerely,

Your friendly local cable company

From the standpoint of the employer there is certainly some risk in hiring someone with a criminal background, however I think most employers go too far in using background checks to weed out prospective employees. Even if someone has a sex crime on their record, every company I've worked for has had a zero tolerance policy on sexual harassment, and made it very clear to all employees. Enforcing that policy of zero tolerance should get any troublemaker fired just about immediately, the company only risks a lawsuit if they didn't properly enforce their own policy. Heck, as a hiring manager a single entry on a criminal record does not to me indicate a significant risk of repeat offense, in fact I'd be more worried that without a job they're likely to re-offend.