BTC supporters tell me that BTC is going to fundamentally transform the economy. I'd certainly like to know a little about who created it, why they created it, and who financed its creation. Sunlight...disinfectant...and all that.

Volatility is a weakness, not a strength, for a digital currency. It's fine to be volatile when a currency is just starting out, but no supporter should be excited by it or want more of it.

It's just an excuse to have an open thread and chat. If that's not your thing, that's fine.

You expect the waiter to act like a professional, not whine about their feeings, and do their job like a boss. When did being professional become a lost art?

Brad Delong has a pretty good summary of the advantages of a market system:

The market economy, based on deep human psychological propensities, is an extraordinarily effective societal instrumentality for planning and coordinating the production and distribution of scarce, rival, excludable commodities.

Malkavian on 2nd playthrough is how I played it and it was fantastic.

If you like the Batman series, you might like the newest Tomb Raider. Uncharted-style gameplay with Arkham Asylum-style exploring and collectibles.

I also played through Beyond Good and Evil again not so long ago.

If you like Beyond Good & Evil, you should try Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which was ported to Windows in October. I really enjoyed both.

There'll be a short-term bounce back--people have too much ideology invested in BTC to believe otherwise, but the long-term viability may be in danger. But I doubt the attackers care about that issue.

Many Olympic sports have "a single country cannot send more than X athletes to compete in this sport" rule. So a pure medals per capita analysis may be misleading.

I've tried the rsync and Unison solutions. If you have all Windows boxes (2 PCs and 2 laptops for my family), the free Microsoft SyncToy is very user friendly to keep a Documents or a Pictures directory synchronized across multiple boxes.

Petrol may well be more valuable than gold in a Mad Max scenario, but don't think for a moment that any collection of humans will not want a way to disintermediate their labor and have a means of trade.

Within their society they'd use reputation-based credit, and with outsiders they'd use petrol. It's not clear why they'd need gold at all in your example.

Almost everyone would pick a million US dollars over the equivalent in gold or bitcoin. You can exchange it easily for practically anything you'd want, and the value is relatively stable.

Same here. I developed an allergy to a certain type of tree nut. Before I went into shock as a child, my parents fed me all sorts of food and nuts, no hesitations. It's bizarre when people assume that food allergies are caused by parental avoidance--usually they just happen.