On "why does NetApp sell their PCIe NAND flash card $30k?", here is your answer, Chris Rima: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=37

In a 3 words: because NetApp can.

It's not the components or engineering behind the card that cost $30k. NetApp prices it so high because the card boosts the performance of their filers by about the same amount as a ~$50k shelf of SAS disks (click that link and go read NetApp's own marketing documentation). They have got to have price points that make sense to customers.

(I know a fraction of you will think "No way!". Well, arbitrary price markups on enterprise gear do exist. This NetApp Flash Cache is effectively priced $150/GB. How do you think that certain competitors can even sell _enterprise_ flash at well below $10/GB? We are not talking 25 or 50% less, but a whole order of magnitude less expensive!)

[...] as opposed to deciding that any home internet connection that tries to send mail is a spam botnet zombie.

To send email from a personal DSL/cable IP address, you should configure your MTA to send through your internet service provider's MTA.

Why don't people know this? This takes care of the problem of "getting my IP address removed from blacklists".

Thus, your best bet with bitcoins is to not spend it, but to hoard it, which means all you have are a bunch of people invest by mining and keeping, knowing they will go up in the future. And this is a problem - and why governments are deathly afraid of deflationary economic environments.

This argument does not work. In fact you can use it against either inflationary or deflationary economics:

• Inflation entices sellers to sell later (but buyers to buy now).
• Deflation entices buyers to buy later (but sellers to sell now).

In reality they have equivalent positive and negative effects.

Yes. In fact, France is already the world's largest net exporter of electricity (67 billion kWh per year): http://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=82

1. Bitcoins are so hard to generate that 1 BTC is worth about 0.80 USD currently. http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/
2. Correct. More powerful hardware (GPUs) generate more Bitcoins. Serious miners have farms of Radeon HD 5970.

Yes because after doing it, you can resell the card for more than half its original price. Profits are even easier if you buy used video cards. But most of all, recouping "half the price" is my own excessively conservative estimate. Personally, I have recouped the cost of multiple Radeon HD 5970 already, and think it is still possible (I continue to invest in more hardware).

You say that Bitcoin is elegant, but solves the wrong problem. I disagree. Read some of the introductory material that explains the flaws of the existing currency models that Bitcoin is trying to address:

• https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Introduction
• http://www.bitcoin.org/sites/default/files/bitcoin.pdf (just read the Introduction)

You are correct that bootstrapping a currency is the most difficult step. However it appears to have done just that: it went from zero to hundreds of merchants in a little over a year: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Of course, there is still a long way to go (most of them are individuals or very small shops), but the very fact it has already grown so quickly and so fast is very encouraging. It was possible because of its truly unique and revolutionary features that really no other currency provide, notably the combination of: absence of middlemen, anonymity, cryptographically irreversible money transfers.

I like to tell people that when they first hear about Bitcoin, they will either instantly dismiss it as something that could never work, or they will immediately understand its large potential :)

Here is a video, for non-technical persons, to help understand Bitcoin:

http://www.weusecoins.com/

It was just made very recently (today!)

Bitcoin's existence is essentially technically insuppressible at this moment: it is fully peer-to-peer, there is no central server or company that can be shut down.

The only risk is social: in other words people could simply lose interest in it. But its network strength (hash rate) has demonstrated a remarkable exponential growth recently. It has doubled every 27 days, continuously, in the last 15 months: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=49 This implies, of course, popularity. So I would say it is very improbable for Bitcoin to just disappear tomorrow.

The goldrush is certainly not over.

It is at the moment still quite profitable to mine on AMD GPUs, assuming your electricity costs are about $0.10/kWh. You will easily recoup at the very least half the price of a high-end video card if you jump in right now. Also the network continuously self-adjusts itself to distribute coins over a long period of time, as this graph shows: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time_graph.png As you can see, we have only generated about 5 million coins so far, out of 21 million. Additionally, many expect the value of 1 Bitcoin to continue to rise, significantly, on the various exchanges over the next few years.

That's the nice thing about Bitcoin: it is less dependent on trust than all other payment systems.

Most significantly, as a Bitcoin user, you do not have to trust a central authority or 3rd party (eg. Paypal or a bank) that may initiate chargebacks, or freeze your accounts, because there is no middleman in Bitcoin.

Of course you need to trust the Bitcoin design itself. But the system has proven its robustness so far, and will (hopefully) continue to do so. If you are curious you may find a list of attacks or flaws, that the Bitcoin network has successfully repelled so far here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents Personally I have rarely found an open source community that was so full of smart people. And I say this with 13+ years of using and contributing to a lot of open source projects.

This is untrue. At work I have set up many times Apache serving different HTTPS name-based virtual hosts using the same IP and port. It is possible by creating a certificate with different "subject alternative names" (for example by passing a configuration file to "openssl req -config xxx" defining subjectAltName=DNS:"foo.example.com",DNS:"bar.example.com"). Here is an example of a certifcate valid for both foo.example.com and bar.example.com. (All OSes support subject alt names, even XP!)

$ openssl x509 -noout -text < server.crt
Certificate:
Data:
Version: 3 (0x2)
Serial Number:
xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
Issuer: CN=My Custom CA
Validity
Not Before: Oct 11 00:00:00 2007 GMT
Not After : Oct 12 00:00:00 2020 GMT
Subject: CN=foo.example.com
Subject Public Key Info:
Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
RSA Public Key: (3072 bit)
Modulus (3072 bit):
...
X509v3 extensions:
X509v3 Basic Constraints:
CA:FALSE
X509v3 Subject Key Identifier:
xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
X509v3 Authority Key Identifier:
keyid:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
X509v3 Subject Alternative Name:
DNS:foo.example.com, DNS:bar.example.com
Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
...

I have worked with dozens of 1U servers from Dell, HP, Supermicro, whitebox, etc, and I have never seen the RAM DIMMs at a 45 degrees angle. Last time DIMMs were at a 45 degrees was 15+ years ago (EDO RAM I think?)

And Linux has bcache.
And Solaris has L2ARC for ZFS (zpool add XXX cache cXdXtX).

Both of these technologies allow the OS to uses a fast SSD as a general cache device for data on slower HDDs.