All in all, the effect of the law ran exactly opposite to the intent of the law

This is not a plausible claim.

If it was just this one example, then maybe it would be, but when you're talking about decades of examples where laws of all types achieve the exact opposite of their stated goals, and when the people enacting and enforcing laws ignore the mountains of evidence of this and continue to do what has been provably shown to accomplish the exact opposite of their stated goals, then it's more rational to assume that the stated goals of the laws have nothing whatsoever to do with the real intent of those enacting and enforcing the laws.

I normally don't care about browser power usage, until I'm trying to maximise the time left on my laptop battery, and then I play close attention to CPU usage and power consumption.

On my laptop Konqueror wins by a very wide margin when it comes to being able to browse the Internet for as long as possible on a single charge. Firefox and Chrome are absolute pigs by comparison.

The problem was old clients did not allocate enough Berkeley DB locks in order to process every valid combination of transactions. Newer clients correct this problem, and users are recommended to upgrade.

If they can't upgrade, then all they need to do is add a configuration file to the directory containing the database with the right MAX_LOCKS setting.

There are no force upgrades here, no forking of the currency - just correcting a misconfiguration that we didn't notice until recently.

Or you can use your nice fission, fusion or orbital solar conversion (which does *not* fall into that last category), and make hydrogen.

That's exactly what I was talking about.

But the portability and current infrastructure of petroleum energy is tough to beat. I'd like to see hydrogen do it, but there's still the infrastructure cost to ameliorate

Infrastructure is not the problem - thermodynamics is. Hydrogen is not a source of energy, since there isn't any of it laying around that we can use.

Pick one: fission, fusion, or "Little House on the Prarie" standard of living. Wind and solar fall into the last category, by the way.

An attacker with more computing power than the rest of the network combined can produce a longer proof of work chain and thus spend on one chain before eventually orphaning it with a different branch that sent the same output to a different address.

The actual amount of computing power needed for this attack does increase exponentially based on how far back in the chain the transaction to be reversed is contained, and the attacker must maintain a majority of hashing power for the entire duration of the attack.

"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table."

I am sure no one with lots of bitcoins keeps them in an exchange they all run their own wallets.

That would be smart, but a surprisingly large number of users let third parties hold dangerously large quantities of their bitcoins for them.

Right. Since you've done such a thorough analysis of the method Bitcoin uses to prevent double spending, you can explain it in your own words and point out specifically where the weaknesses are?

That tiny island is probably more solvent than the United States. Our balance sheets only look better because of a complete lack of transparency and honest accounting.

Those depositors were generally not "people in Cyprus" but rather "people in Russia with money in Cyprus".

No, the Russians were all tipped off ahead of time, and were able to withdraw their money via overseas branches that remained open during the freeze in Cyprus. The only people who were affected were regular people and small businesses.

I'm sure the customers of Laiki Bank were highly satisfied with their government-provided deposit insurance too, right up until they lost all access to their funds for a few weeks, and lost the majority of their balances. I'm sure the people who aren't getting paid because the company they work had payroll funds frozen are singing the praises of deposit insurance right this minute.

Probably something hugely overblown if it's got such little verifiable about it.

Quoted for posterity. Thanks for the comedy.

though from what I hear, the NSA just isn't on that scale these days (they once had a significant portion of the world's computing power).

Nobody is on the scale of Bitcoin these days. Titan is approaching two orders of magnitude behind and Bitcoin shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.