I honestly thought it would be the fiat mismanagement at MtGox that would bring them down, BTC insolvency. Most of you seem to ignore the fact that they only had about half of the customer fiat currency "in customer accounts" in their bank when they closed up. If I request a fiat withdraw from Bitstamp then it's in my account the next day. As for btc-e, I don't use it and I strongly recommend that you don't use it either. If Bitstamp suddenly stops processing withdraws of any kind (BTC or fiat) in a timely fashion I'll be out of there before you can say "bank robbery". This is currently not the case.

Failed exchanges are supposed to die. This is how a free market is supposed to work. I have been warning against using MtGox since April 2013 and you can all go check my Bitcointalk posts to see that this is true. If you request a withdraw from an exchange and it suddenly takes two weeks instead of a few days before you get your money then it is time to get out. If the delay increases to four weeks then six then months then it's clearly time to not only get out but also warn others about this exchange. A whole lot of extremely stupid people ignored all the red flags and alarmbells and they lost money when this exchange went bankrupt. This is very good. A small percentage of the people who lost money at MtGox will learn from this and be more careful and picky as to where they place their money in the future. If you do not have control of the private keys of a Bitcoin then you don't have the Bitcoin, you have an IOU with someone who may or may not hold Bitcoin for you. The demise of MtGox will sadly make many of the idiots who lost money there cry for more government, more regulation and more fascism. Fascism is not a good solution, more personal responsibility is the solution. As I said, there were dozens of red flags yet people kept using this clowncar exchange. "but but but I can arbitrage because the price is 25% higher there" said a lot of people who ended up loosing their money. Well duh, why do you think that 25% premium was there in the first place, stupid? In short: Fools and their money are usually separated. If you can't bother to do five minutes of basic research of the place where you plan to place thousands or millions of dollars then you get what you deserve. This is, in my opinion, a good thing.

The US government is using it's infrastructure and networks to spy on everyone so it naturally assumes that China is going this as well.

> Google makes links available, is not charged or fined
> Guy clicks links on Google search engine, is fined
Am I the only one who has a problem with this "logic"?

> act as a money transmitter, and the exchange is between $300 and $20k within a 12 month period

That's fascism for you, using cash was basically outlawed while you stupid americans were busy watching TV. $300 isn't even one Bitcoin. This effectively makes everyone who buys or sells bitcoins criminals - unless they get a "license" to do something which should be perfectly legal to do without a license in the first place.

I liked the simple yet configurable Gnome interface, then they took it away from me with Gnome 2.. but I got used to it somehow. Then they took that away from me with Gnome 3 and I've been using XFCE4 since. My "simple light working dekstop" preference hasn't changed much over the years, but the GNU/Linux desktops has. KDE today isn't like KDE 2 (which was usable), it's HUGE (but atleast I can configure it to be a simple desktop if I want). GNOME3? wtf. My preferences didn't change, GNOME did.

There's plenty of good browsers for GNU/Linux and GNU/Linux itself has a market share of perhaps 1%. I'm guessing Opera's got maby 1% of that and 1% of 1% isn't much. I think ditching GNU/Linux support does make sense from a business perspective if they only drop support for that. Focusing on Opera mini for Android and things like that probably makes a lot more sense. Regardless: I truly believe Opera is highly overvalued right now http://www.netfonds.no/quotes/... and it's much likely a good short at this price level. This is not investment advice, I'm just a guy who've had a 20%+ _monthly_ return on his portfolio the last 6 months (I only had 17% one month 7 months ago which ruined my streak) so use your own common sense. Just sayin that the it's got one very attractive downside at this price point.

Still using a Phenom II 3x *CPU* and it's fast enough for my GNU/Linux system so I see little reason to upgrade it - but if I decide to do so then I would very much like to buy a CPU, not a APU. Would it be so hard for AMD and Intel to offer actual CPUs again? Am I the only one who would like to buy one at some point? APUs are nice if you want a cheap system with alright graphics.. but why do they force us to buy one even if all we want/need is a CPU?

We have a bunch of free blog services. You can sign up and get a free blog and use it for the criminal activity until we notice or someone points it out to us. Do you really think it is fair take a domain with thousands of subdomains under it because it was " involved in actual criminal activity" at some point? You must really love fascism and the current governments in the "free world".

Expressen could have just disabled Disqus on their own site and they would have full access to IPs and e-mails of users commenting on their hatespeech site.

This should come as a surprise to nobody. It's a long well-known fact that the majority of the top editors at Wikipedia are paid to do so. Normal people can't compete with someone who's paid full-time to edit Wikipedia and this is the reason it can't be trusted - not even a little bit. And PR-Agencies aren't really the biggest problem - government employees are. Why do you think that Wikipedia is parroting the government line on all subjects where the government is presenting untruthful information through the mainstream media? Because Wikipedia is edited and administrated by the same people who write the government propaganda press releases for the mainstream media, that's why. Do your own research and thinking. You'll be amazed.

> I laugh at anyone who trusts Google with their data, or authentication.

Yes, I know Google is pure evil. Google Auth is based on an open standard & it is open source. As I wrote in parent post: This means that there is a whole range of implementations available. I use the Google Auth standard for auth at various Bitcoin exchanges but I do not use any Google software to do it, I use other implementations. You can use Google Auth without trusting Google with jack shit. (and yeah, I know they are evil, I've removed all the Google spyware / crapware from my phone, I don't have their appstore, etc)

If you want secure / two-factor today then you'll use Google Authenticator - which is what all bitcoin exchanges use. It's the standard. We don't need a new one. And it's open, so you don't need a smartphone, you can use a PC version like JAuth. This QR code thing is less smart as it would need you to actually have a smartphone - and that's a very dumb idea. The Google Authenticator standard does not, but you should use a another device (notebook computer, tablet, phone, whatever) for it since that's more secure. Anyway, this story is a yawn but that and censorship is what I've come to expect from Slashdot these days.

Censorship based on the use of common words is something that happens all over these days. I have a few websites with Google Adsense on them. Google sends spam e-mails about "adult content" on a poetry site I have regularly. It's mostly poetry from the 16th, 17th and 18th century on that site. Words like "lover" trigger their malfunctioning bot. Webmasters have the choice between censoring perfectly normal content, and in my case poems, that no human in their right mind would have a problem with. I'm not shocked or amazed that this is happening with ebooks, Google has been doing this for a long time now. It reminds me of the book 1984. I'm glad this is getting some attention here today - because this is far more common than most people realize.

Say you have a job and make $5.000 per month. Don't mind if you make more or less and that I just took a round figure out of thin air. That works out to $60000 per year. Five years go by and you've earned $300000. How much money is there in your account 5 years later? Do you likely have $300000 sitting there in your account at that point in time? OR did you perhaps spend each months paycheck paying for rent, utilities, food and other items? I don't know about you but if you are like most people then you probably do NOT have $300000 sitting there in your account after 5 years. You more likely spent everything you got last month and perhaps you have $2000 left of that last $5000 paycheck sitting there in your account. Think about this for a minute. The claim is that SR generated an income of 600.000 BTC. The price of a Bitcoin was $1-2 during SRs lifetime. It was less than $10 during most of SRs lifetime. Media story and popular opinion seems to be that Ulbricht never spent a single Bitcoin but somehow managed to pay bills and expenses anyway and that all bitcoins SR ever made therefore must be sitting in a wallet somewhere. I personally find that opinion highly unlikely.