Cash is only worth what people are willing to trade for it, I fail to see how Bitcoin is inherently any different.

Amen to that, I've yet to see a torrent site with the same level of Niche stuff that Demonoid used to have. If ever I found another site with that same quality of content I'd join in an instant.

True, but a corporation can only be this evil because there's no specific accountability to the people who own the corporation. Corporations act as a shield for individual liability, that's their only real purpose. If the people who own a corporation were exposed to the same legal and financial risks, they probably wouldn't do half the shit they do.

Well, there's certainly worse things that a zombie network can do. Hell, I'm downright in favor of some greyhat hacker putting Tor exit nodes into a botnet. I mean ideally we'd shut down every bot net out there, but since that's not realistically going to happen this would at least be a nice consolation prize while they go about their business DDoSing bitcoin or whatever else happens to be in vogue for a botnet to do these days.

terminal server for thin clients?

Fair enough, you are correct that it's the block rate that's fixed, not the rate of coin generation, just that the 'block reward' happens to be what most people care about when it comes to a new block.

Or decreases if the computational power of the network drops (granted advances in technology make that unlikely in the long term, and only minimally impactful in the short term). The difficulty self adjusts SO that the rate of coin generation remains largely fixed.

They're not independent variables, the more power you have the faster you can compute an equation to match the current difficulty, and earn more coins, it just also happens that the difficulty is self adjusting so that the rate which coins are found stays apx. = to 1 per 10 minutes. If the computational power of the network is strong enough that it's taking less than 10 minutes for someone to find a block, the difficulty rises until that is no longer true, and if the computational power of the network drops enough that it's taking more than 10 minutes for someone to find a block the difficulty drops.

To be fair MtGox is actually very well managed, I don't mean to indicate that they're not up to par, I think their 80% dominance is perfectly justified. It's not like they're an inferior product that's putting all competitors out of business simply because they were first.

There are multiple exchanges, it just happens that MtGox has the 'Microsoft monopoly'. They're the de facto standard, primarily because they were one of the first to hit the scene, their service is for the most part 'good enough', there was enough widespread adoption that people are familiar and comfortable with it, and there's no one else who's got something significantly better to entice people to switch.

I mean, it just wouldn't be proper to wear anything under their kilts.

I know my cat would probably murder me if I tried to put it in a microwave, so in that sense no it's not particularly safe for you to microwave your cat. If you meant would it be safe for your cat, then sorta. I suppose you could probably expose it to 3-5 seconds of microwaves without any particularly ill effects, maybe a slight sunburn (do cats even get sunburns?), but any more than that and it would probably start getting serious damage. If you figure an average microwave can heat a burrito from frozen solid to 'too hot to eat' in about 75 seconds, then there's definitely enough energy to make your cat all explodey and dead in the same time frame.

Bitcoins are actually only divisible up to 8 decimal places. However that is something built into the Bitcoin spec. Mining serves the purpose of creating new blocks, but it also serves the purpose of verifying transactions. For a transaction to be codified into a 'block' at least 51% of the network has to 'agree' that it's a valid transaction (how exactly they reach that agreement is a separate matter, but involves time stamps and what not). I'm over simplifying things, but this is integral to how bitcoin functions. Included in the protocol whenever you perform a transaction and send bitcoins to someone is the option to include a 'transaction fee', the idea is that this small, optional fee helps get your transaction pushed through, because certain miners can be programed to ignore transactions with a transaction fee below a certain threshold.

Now if just 1 miner ignores your transaction that's not a big deal, but if 51% of them ignore it, your transaction never gets verified. The same algorithm that generates new blocks and rewards (now 25, used to be 50) BTC, also includes all the transaction fees of transactions codified in that block as part of the block reward. So the theory is that once the block reward itself becomes unprofitable, miners will continue to mine (since that's what codifies transactions) for the transaction fees.

For this to be a successful avenue of attack you have to be sure that the servers you want to target are actually located at the bunker you're attacking. By accounts this one datacenter is not the only one they operate, the others are all similarly sequestered in bunkers. Sure you can break into a bunker given enough time and effort, there is no such thing as an impenetrable fortress. However you can make the efforts required to break in unfeasible, and this is even doubly so if you're not even sure that once you get in, you'll be able to find what you're looking for.