Surely this is the sort of thing that could be solved once and for all by paying a few hackers to write some open source software? Hell, I bet you could raise all the money you needed from a Kickstarter project: this is the sort of problem that I know other countries apart from the USA face. The UK's NHS has had terrible IT problems for at least a decade. Solve it once, solve it internationally, and force the competition to (open) up their game or go out of business.

Mod parent up for good parent...ing.

Someone who just bought an iPhone 6 Plus, perhaps?

People who buy into the whole Apple lifestyle thing tend to be quite resistant to admitting flaws in Apple's products. There are bound to be a few of that sort working at Consumer Reports.

Actually, if Bitcoin succeeds magnificently in the future, this sale could be very good, on several counts.

First, the NSA will divest itself of a currency that in the future could be immensely valuable, thus preventing them from being able to wreak havoc on Bitcoin after it gets more established, and more of a threat to fiat currencies that inflate year-on-year.

Second, driving the price down will encourage some holders of large stashes to sell while they can. This will distribute the currency more evenly across the market, so that at the point the currency becomes valuable again, a Bitcoin "middle class" will be created, rather than a few zillionaires and a lot of paupers.

Third, the above will help to stabilize Bitcoin's value, as there will be less incentive or ability for a few very rich individuals to game the system, purposely attempting to drive the price down to reap the rewards when it comes back up again.

I suspect that each time Bitcoin crashes, the wealth contained in the currency gets spread more evenly across the population that is using it, because of the number of Bitcoins sold in order to drive the price down. This is a feature, not a bug. At this stage, we want Bitcoin to gain broad acceptance, and that won't happen until it has a large userbase. The crashes should help that userbase to grow. Each time Bitcoin crashes, it crashes less hard than the last. That suggests to me that it is becoming increasingly stable.

Judging from the summary, their idea sounds more like the Information Spaghetti Junction.

At the moment, monetary wealth is incredibly disproportionately held. Doesn't stop fiat currencies working.

If Bitcoin takes off as an international currency, then the initial enthusiasm of early adopters will have played a large part in this. Those bit-billionaires deserve a very hefty reward for getting a currency started that governments can't print at will, or track.

To the extent they spend their money, they redistribute it throughout society, and they'll have to spend it in order to get, at the very least, food, water, and utilities.

True, an eeeevil bit-zillionaire could crash the value of bitcoin. But two observations spring to mind about this:

1. What happened to Zimbabwe's currency? What happened to the mark during the Weimar Republic? What the hell do you think the bank bailouts and Quantitative Easing have been doing to the Dollar, Euro and Pound Sterling recently? You don't need eeeeevil bit-zillionaires in order to monkey with the currency, you just need an unscrupulous government, which can be had for tuppence ha'penney. At least you can't print Bitcoins.

2. If you're worried about the value of Bitcoin crashing (reasonable), don't keep your savings in Bitcoin! Keep it in something else (gold?), and use a service that will easily exchange your gold for bitcoins when you want to cash in some of them. Such services would spring up pretty readily in the event that Bitcoin took of but remained volatile.

Speaking as an Englishman (as I tap my pipe out on my mantlepiece), in my opinion a 3-party system functions as horridly as a 2-party one.

"Introducing... the 3 Party System! Now with 50% extra choice! Running the gamut of meta-opinions from A to C!"

According to TFA, the Jedi in question lives in Southend, England.

But fuck it, you're having fun. Rant on, sir, rant on!

"It's called self-deprecating humor. I'm a male, so I get to make fun of men."

Assuming you're a man, saying "all men are stupid" deprecates you --- that's 1 person --- and 3 billion other people.

It's 3 billion times more *other*-deprecating than self-deprecating.

Not saying racist and sexist jokes aren't funny.

But they're not self-deprecating.

Needing the teller to belong to the group the joke targets, ain't about self-deprecation on the teller's part. It's about what sort of things an audience is prepared to listen to, and from whom.

I think you may be taking a too local view of the odds.

Assume around 100 people win the lottery jackpot every year (about right for the UK's National Lottery, don't know about other versions)
Assume world population stabilizes at around 10 billion (figure pulled proudly out of my arse).
Assume an asteroid wipes out nearly all life on earth once every 100 million years.

J Random Human's chance of winning the lottery this year = 1E2 / 1E10 = 1E-8.
J Random Human's chance of getting killed by the next KT event this year = 1E-8.

Sure around 100 people win the jackpot every year, but it'll take 100 million years for the lottery to become more successful at awarding money than lone asteroids are at killing things.

But I'm an actor, so my maths are probably totally wrong. Anyone care to put me out of my misery?

One day, big enough.

You can download much larger versions of this image from the following link:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/28/image/b/warn/

I'm downloading the 50 MB TIFF at the moment.