OK, so what is it about Bitcoin that makes it so hard to create a safe exchange?

This is not a trick question. If there's going to be a magical currency outside of government overview, we need to know.

It hasn't crashed yet because the current BitBelievers are buying up the stock folks are selling off, thinking they are getting "fire sale" prices.

A lot of the true believers are throwing good money after bad, hoping to keep the market up.

Or, criminal bitcoin owners are keeping the bubble inflated, hoping things quiet down so they can cash out.

At least now we have refutation that Mt Gox was an isolated case.

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.

Here's why - and I speak as someone who apparently lost a small amount there - because Mt. Gox was the only place where I could turn BTC into EUR. So I sent them the amount I wanted to convert, but not my entire wallet.

You are right that anyone who stores their wallet with someone else is crazy. But people actually used the exchanges as - surprise - exchanges. Which required at least temporarily transferring the coins.

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.

Is it possible to make something illegal if you don't know what it is? How can you fight something if you don't know how widespread it is? How do you find something if you don't try to look for it?

My goodness, you actually believe that the UK's net filter actually has something to do with child porn?

Why cant we have a market for testers?

Because markets, especially global ones, are short-term focused.

Make your money and tomorrow I'll be miles away. Focus on the quarterly stock price, because once I get my bonus, I skate.

Why can't we have a market for testers? Because what happens when testee can pay more than the government? If a private corporation is in charge of testing, then it would violate their charter not to take the bribe.

Remember, there are no markets in nature. They only exist to the extent that there is a sufficiently powerful arbiter. The reason our system is so out-of-whack is because the sufficiently powerful arbiter has had corruption institutionalized, most recently made permanent by a court decision known as Citizens United.

With a state monopoly provider, they can screw up over and over again without any real consequences.

Only if the recourse of the governed has been first removed, which is why you are seeing voter suppression efforts in the same states that are "right-to-work". Can't have everyone voting if there's a chance they'll mess up the cozy corporate-government relationship.

links? what toys don't work with the iPad air?

The very first one I randomly chose:

http://www.musiciansfriend.com...

Shitty 100 USD Android tablets that have crap spyware apps

And that can be easily rooted and have a clean copy of Android, along with the ability to drill down and manage the individual apps to remove their access with privacy in mind.

the cool stuff you can do for music production or video on the premiere tablet platform

There are now low-latency audio solutions for Android, and a very long list of high-quality production apps available.

Even the very best hardware and software for making music on tablets are little more than novelties. And the best hardware for music production on iOS doesn't even work on the latest rev of the iPad. Take a look at the Mackie mixers or Apogee dongles. Some of them still want you to have a "Apple Camera Adapter" in order to use them. Even the $99 Launchpad from Ableton is a flimsy toy. A full-blown Launchpad or Ableton's new Push won't talk to your "premiere tablet platform".

On the other hand, my "$100 Android tablet" has a real USB port. Let's see you plug a iPad into an MPC Studio.

I won't even mention that my Surface Pro can actually run Pro Tools and run VSTi virtual instruments and plugins. If you want to do real music production with a tablet, you're better off with a Windows tablet (oh no he didn't!).

What will actually happen: gamifying work ruins games.

Brother, you said it.

Also, this study assumes employers want to make their employees' lives better. They would much rather automate a job than make it pleasurable for a human.

Bullshit paranoia reply. Sure, it could happen, but seriously, would you buy this crap? Now ignorant Joe may - but when he comes home from the shop with his Brand X in hand only to find that he does, in fact, have Brand Y in the fridge, he'll consider it broken.

One way or the other, this kind of blatant abuse is not going to happen. The marketing parasites are smarter than that. They'll datamine the hell out of you, and they'll manipulate you, but they won't be caught lying to you outright in a way that you can spot.

They've already got the script:

"First, let me say that I'm sorry that you're having a problem with your Bitcoin service today..."

Uh, actually that's one of the very few examples I can think of that does have a use. How often have you been in the supermarket and wondered "do I have any X at home or not?"

...this is a publicity stunt. 300k is the total price money, the highest an individual entry can win is 75k. Sorry, but the real experts expect amounts like that as payment, not as maybe-couldbe-whoknows price money.

So you'll have participants largely being the B class who need the exposure and publicity. That's fine. Maybe not for a general concept, though.

More importantly: What's so different about the "Internet of Things"? That's just the latest buzzword. It's still network-connected devices. Sure, they're basically embedded devices so you have to use tools with low resource demands, but it's not like we invented a completely new computing system. Strip the buzzword and what you're really left with is small computers built into stuff around the house.

"Well, at least it sounds scientific."

If you ever want to see this in spades, take a look at some of the work of the Discovery Institute, especially books like, "Darwin's Doubt", in which it is established that because life is so complicated, it couldn't possibly have come from evolution, because organisms are like computers, and you don't see computers coming from evolution.

I'm not joking. This is the guy's refutation of evolution. "Because intelligence can only comes from intelligence (see: Computers), and organisms have information in them, there must be an Intelligent Designer." That, and because there should have been more fossils found from the Cambrian Explosion.

The guy says it's not a religious argument, but rather scientific, until someone asks him about reduction of, "well if intelligence only comes from intelligence, then you must be a polytheist, because where did the Intelligent Designer come from?"

Then, the answer always boils down to, "Well, it's God obviously, but this is about science, not religion". I'm not joking. The book is called "Darwin's Doubt" and it has become the camel's nose of creationism, poking under the tent of science education.

They say they want to "teach the controversy".