I have used it, actually. And I have a wallet with ~4.19 BTC... for which there's ~17.1 GiB of Bitcoin blockdata on my hard drive.

Not what I think of when I think of an easy way to transfer value, especially when coupled with the volatility of the medium. For trading small amounts of money with people in other countries, there are better ways, at least for the people I need to do that with - either using electronic checks (which are free, with my bank) or using the micropayments systems set up by cell providers in the portions of the world that aren't "industrialized"/1st world/whatever the term is.

Regarding what a Ponzi scheme is, maybe you should hit up Wikipedia (or where ever) and read the definition of a Ponzi scheme.. and then consider the history of BTCs. BitCoin might not be an Italian guy taking money for imaginary stamp transactions, sure... but an anonymous coder taking money for imaginary crypto transactions seems close enough that claiming it's something entirely different is splitting hairs. And lest we forget, the same person (or group) that mined block zero and thousands of subsequent blocks before releasing this to the open source community currently owns millions of BTCs. Last I checked a couple years ago, he/she/they had over 12% of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist... and you're seriously trying to say it's not a Ponzi scheme? How do you think the bubble's being inflated and the next round of investors is being paid off, if not by the money the previous round of investors put in, care of the inventor(s) and that multi-million BTC stockpile he/she/they built up? Think about it - sure sounds to me like an internet-age version of stamps scam that Ponzi ran.

If it was on the level, they would have done what the Litecoin did guy, and released (or re-released) the project after proving it worked, rather than only after securing a dominant ownership share. LiteCoins may share a lot of the same fundamental flaws as BitCoin (being a fork of the original project), and not be viable long-term, but at least I can trust LiteCoins. The guy who forked it mined 3 blocks before releasing it to the world, rather than being more concerned about getting a dominant ownership position in the market he was creating... so if I were to get behind any crypto-currency or digital currency at this stage in the game, it would be LiteCoins. It might (also) be a bubble, or doomed to failure, but at least it's not a scam by the inventor.

Really?

It's not that hard to understand... then again, I'm a bitcoin hater, so maybe that's why I see it as easy to understand... let me try to fill you in.

1) Enough already. I hear so much hype about it, it's almost as bad as the never-ending election coverage I have to suffer through for 18 months before the elections. I know about it, am not interested, and would rather not see reminders about it every-fucking time I blink.

2) It over-promises and under-delivers (at least as reported on in every story I read, and implemented in the real world). A world changing innovation that will revolutionize currency and break our dependence on evil national governments and usher in a new era.... except that it won't because it's so fundamentally broken on so many levels.

3) I would love to see a viable cryptocurrency take off and break or loosen the hold that evil leviathan government has over the world today. The reality of Bitcoin, however, is that it is a bubble/ponzi scheme/lottery that enriches the lucky few early adopters at the expense of public trust in cryptocurrency, and once the Bitcoin bubble has come and gone, the odds of a fair, viable cryptocurrency being widely accepted by the public go way down. The fact that such a badly broken system is what's going to be equated with all cryptocurrency by the public and the media shatters any hopes I have of actually seeing a meaningful adoption of purely digital, non-government backed currency transactions for the foreseeable future.

We are literally on the verge of an era where the technology exists to break governments of their iron grasp on currency (and therefore the world's economies), but instead of seeing that happen, I get to read a bunch of stories about this technologically brilliant ponzi scheme that's going to poison public opinion against that happening.

And all so some lucky fucks (who aren't me) can get rich on the Bitcoin bubble. What's not to hate?

How to destroy a powerful brand in 1 easy steps! (SourceForge, not GIMP.)

And yeah, while SourceForge has been declining for a while now, this is something entirely different from a slow decline... they may as well have taken it out back and shot it. Be quicker, and probably cheaper in the long run too.

It's not like getting a loan is a right, and that's what this essentially is. The US and EU have decided they won't lend money to build new coal power plants. Seems like a reasonable enough policy, and one that's fully within their rights as the people lending the money in the first place.

With a beam of light? A lot. Check out the latest demos of ground-based missile defense lasers. The power sources (and related cooling) for those are in trailers hauled around by 18-wheelers. Doesn't sound like something you'll be able to fit on a drone any time soon.

Like any "futurist," fortune teller or psychic, the accuracy of his predictions is based on having even the slightest clue, making vague or broad enough predictions that they're almost universally applicable, and relying on selective memory to erase all the predictions you made that didn't pan out. (Like some war with China that was mentioned in TFA.)

Which isn't to say that a think tank devoted to thinking about future wars and military tactics or strategies is a bad idea, or charlatanism, just to say that his ability to predict the future is being wildly overstated. I'm sure he has a sharp military mind, and good analytical skills to make the correct predictions he did, but that's a far cry from predicting the future.

I mean, I knew Google was going to be huge before their IPO... now that their stock's over $1,00 per share, does that qualify me as a technology or stock market futurist?

Yeah, being funny. Although, at the same time, it's true for the city I live in.

The only major metropolitan area in central Ohio (where my employer and I are located) hasn't had a serious natural disaster in a century - the only thing I could turn up from a quick Google search was some flood in 1913. The only thing I can remember that might qualify as a natural disaster was some big hail storm in the mid 00's that did some property damage. I'm kind of hard-pressed to call it a natural disaster when the primary impact was car dealers having to discount a bunch of new, hail-damaged cars, though.

Well, yeah, except that Dell was right, in 1997, about what to do with Apple as a company that made computers.

Of course, it turned out that shifting their core business model from making computers to making gadgets was an even better idea.

No tornadoes here either. (Ohio Valley, Central Ohio). We don't get any natural disasters... I guess God figures that living in Ohio is punishment enough.

My employer and I are still located in the Midwest, and still do nothing to prepare for hurricanes.

Limited resources. They spend more resources on crimes that are more damaging than simply having a game account stolen (which sucks, but is hardly life-altering) or crimes they can make money off of (speeding, asset forfeiture, etc.).

And, except for that last part where they play the role of modern-day highway robbers (literally, even), that's as it should be. There are enough *real* crimes that cause victims serious harm, so having your video gaming account stolen should never be a top priority for police, IMO.

You don't have that quite right.

Microsoft's licensing model is such that they make vastly more from OEM and corporate sales than from end-consumer OS purchases. It's not that they don't care about piracy, (remember all that shit around activating Vista and 7, and WGA causing problems for legit users?) it's more that the sliver of income they get from consumer OS purchases isn't worth devoting resources to protect from piracy.

In the first place, do you actually think that people selected to be on a firing squad haven't used the gun and ammo type they'll be using? That seems pretty haphazard and ill-thought out, even for government work. (And for the record, the selectees are typically current or former military or law-enforcement.)

In the second place, that's really not true anyway. I'd assert that anyone with a decent amount of experience firing guns would be able to accurately assess whether he fired a blank or a live round, even on an unknown gun/caliber combination, especially with rifles - they generally have more recoil than handguns. I might have trouble telling if I fired a blank from a .22 handgun, but I don't have that problem with an M-16/AR-15 that uses .223 ammo. Like I said above, given that executioners typically come from law enforcement or the military, it seems exceedingly unlikely to me that they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.