AFAICT, it looks like you can't use God scientific evidence of anything. This makes sense because the existence of a creator cannot be empirically determined (can you think of a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove that there is a creator?). That is unless the creator revealed himself to us, at which point, the study of the creator would be a science.

Totally read "4 terabytes of pornography". I was debating where to make a toast to you or send you a drum of Jergens.

Good for you. I actually agree with your position. We are not the majority.

I will bet one Internet that as soon as a Republican President is put in charge of NSA surveillance those poll numbers will flip overnight. As long as the guy from the other party is doing X, X is bad. When its your bastard doing it, X is suddenly good.

Of course they can be used to pay taxes. I paid the balance of my federal income tax using a credit card.

Yes, I know...

I've worked with payment processing here in the States. You can store the number and the expiration date but not the CVV2. Of course, no CVV2 means higher processing fees, which means customers will ask for ways of storing the CVV2. We tell them that makes them non-compliant and they don't really care. They just want lower processing fees and pay lip service to compliance.

This is about the only false part of your post. Taxes must be paid in legal tender, which Bitcoins are not. One must first convert them to dollars and then onward to the tax man.

I would put it past them. This is incredibly small potatoes for them. I know a lot of the bitcoin apologists think they're doing something incredibly revolutionary. They aren't. Basic economics says this is bound to failure because there is a fixed amount of coins to be mined. That's a very bad feature of a currency (works great for an investment, though one will always need to find the next fool)

Maybe organized crime is involved or maybe a couple of 8th graders. I really don't know, nor do I care. I'm just basking in the shadenfreude at this point.

My toaster isn't worth as much as it was when I bought it, either.

Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange, not an investment. If you believe that a zero inflation rate is a good thing, I suggest you take an introductory course in economics.

Yes. That is the kind of logic you get when you've been reading the website he's linking to.

Not everwhere is there a monopoly. For instance where I live in Columbus, I can choose from Time Warner or WOW. If you or I or anyone else wanted to, they could set up a company and run their own wires. Guess what? No one else wants to. Last mile connectivity is a natural monopoly and ought to be regulated as a utility.

As someone else in the comments said, let's require them to split the infrastructure from the services. Then we'll have real competition.

Yeah, but that would mean that Kansas would have to admit that lesbians are people with equal rights and responsibilities. Not likely.

True. Not only AP but CS at all. When I was in high school (early aughts), no programming/CS classes were even offered. To the best of my knowledge they still aren't.

Well the question is really why is it such a recent phenomena in the US? Its a very difficult question to answer. Bowling for Columbine tried to answer it (or at least pretended to try to answer it), and didn't really have a good answer.

I don't think anyone can make a case that school shootings are a direct consequence of a lack of firearms. That can't possibly be true as evidenced by the fact that Europe doesn't have these things happen daily. It has to be something cultural. We do have a weird fetishization with firearms in this country. I don't know where that came from. Perhaps it was a necessary consequence of decades of moving west across the plains and living off the land.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but it simply cannot be the case that school shootings are directly related to the number of privately-owned guns.

Now that's the right attitude to have. You know it's a bunch of people buying an investment (not a currency), hoping it will appreciate so that they can cash out once it hits a high enough price point.

Bitcoin/Litecoin is an (irrational) investment, not a currency.