It seems that Julian Assange is a hardcore Bitcoin fanboy... he spent about a third of his interview talking about it.

That said, if he took his own advice and invested heavily in Bitcoin back in 2011 when they were less than a $1 each, he'd be a wealthy guy right now.

Considering that one of their freelance journalists (Tim Lee) on forbes.com is one of the biggest supporters of Bitcoin.

Check out all of the articles he's written about how great Bitcoin is:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/

I find it amusing that they let this one freelance writer attempt to pump up his personal Bitcoin stash on such a popular financial site.

Of course, this is Forbes... They'll post anything for page views and ad impressions. I still remember the crap they posted about the merits of SCO's pathetic Linux patent infringement case against IBM back in the day, mostly because they loved the negative attention from the Microsoft and Linux fanboys.

With the number of Bitcoin fanatics currently on Slashdot, I'm sure that there would be at least one person here who would rather be dead than lose their wallet file with a $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency on it :)

Yeah... if you're going to try mining with a botnet, it would make a lot more sense to mine Litecoins instead. The Litecoin mining software still works relatively well with CPU miners, and there is a better chance that the currency is going to appreciate in value.

It seems that good ol' Bitcoin is having problems scaling up to meet the new demand for cryptocurrency. Perhaps we should start looking into alternate cryptocurrencies like Litecoin instead?

Yeah... it's more of a "pump and dump" scam than a ponzi scheme.

I think of Bitcoin along the same line as penny stocks... something that is basically worthless, but can be easily inflated with some good story and enough suckers to buy into it.

Then you sell out of your position quickly, and watch the whole thing crash. If you're lucky, people will forget what what happened in a few months and then you can pull the same scam all over again.

Hell, Bitcoin has already crashed before once when Mt Gox got hacked in 2011. Do you really want to invest in a "currency" that can go from $30 to $1 in less than a day?

Exactly. When it comes to anti competitive behavior, Apple in 2012 is every bit as ruthless as Microsoft was in the late 1990's.

If Microsoft still has a Borg icon, Apple should have one as well.

I know that smartphones are rapidly evolving, but I think that it's going to take more than 3 or 4 years before they have enough memory, storage, and CPU power to take over the duties of a desktop PC.

At the rate they are progressing, a smartphone plugged into a docking station should by able to handle web surfing, e-mail, and light office work in a few years. Something more intensive like PC gaming or video editing? Give it another decade or so.

I'd vote for an HP TouchSmart 610 myself, since it comes with a TV tuner and a remote controller. It also has a built-in Blu-Ray player and comes with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse along with a touchscreen. I'd think that I would fit into a kitchen fairly well.

The only downsides I see is that TouchSmart's aren't cheap, and they do not have official Linux support. That said, I see them on sale all the time.

Not really... even if you disable updates, Mozilla might decide to remotely disable your plugins if they think that they contain security or stability issues.

They've already screwed up a lot of working Firefox installations that had old Java plugins with that "feature".

Of course, you can disable the "blocklist" feature as well, but not without editing the user.js file or going into the about:config screen.

Perhaps the places where you worked are different than the places that I've worked, but most of the bosses and HR people that I've dealt with didn't have a clue about technology. If I had a question about a specific piece of hardware or software I wanted to install on my company laptop, I'd ask my local friendly IT guy instead. That way,I make sure that I got a straight answer instead of a educated guess.

That said, you can get a decent laptop for $500 now. Even if it was allowed, do you really want put your personal stuff that you paid for on a company laptop, knowing that it's one IT security policy change away from being wiped out or corrupted?

It was pretty basic, and damned effective. We had an online request system with three priority levels (Low, Medium, High), and a warning that choosing the incorrect priority level for your project would cause it to be delayed. If someone chose High priority when we knew that it wasn't (like they wanted a test server to play with), it instantly got demoted to Low and the customer had to wait an extra week for it to be done.

After seeing their co-workers low and medium priority projects being completed long before their own, most people took the hint and started categorizing their requests properly. The ones who didn't waited a lot. Sure, they occasionally bitched to management about the delay, but we usually had the work done before our management even bothered to respond to their complaint.

Or, they could be competing with Netflix for the "Worst technology business decision of 2011" award.

I heard that they have a statue this year!