The fact that he can't sell them all now is irrelevant, he can sell them eventually and probably for an average of far more than $7 per.

impossible to "game" the system

The system has already been "gamed" by its very creator and a handful of early adopters. They mined most of the bitcoins currently in existence and then they made people believe in their value and became millionaires. (Satoshi is said to own between 1 and 2 million bitcoins, that's between $7M and $14M at current market prices.) Regardless of the usefulness of the idea itself, bitcoin was also designed to be a get rich quick scheme. You could conceive a similar digital currency, where wealth distribution was not so heavily biased towards early adopters.

If developers writing competing software having prior knowledge of [parts of] the code of the original was not a problem, the concept of clean room reverse engineering wouldn't exist.
But since the Mono project used not to accept contributions from people that have seen Microsoft's shared source code, they are definitely aware of the danger and must be confident that a lawsuit from Attachmate isn't coming.

Who knows what's included in their build, they only provide outdated code as archive fragments on rapidshare... whether it's because of malice or ineptitude, I wouldn't run any software those guys produce. Publishing a project on github or similar service is not rocket science.
I once tried asking what the deal was on their forums, but my post didn't make it through moderation.

That's like saying the "proprietary software community" shot itself in the foot by continuing the division between Windows and MacOS.
Gnome and KDE are large software stacks built on completely separate foundations, by separate teams skilled in different programming environments, and there's no unifying the codebases without throwing one of them away. Developers involved in freedesktop.org have been working on interoperability for the last 11 years, I'm not sure what more you could expect.

Using public keys as addresses would be pretty sweet, but how do you route traffic through a network with randomly distributed addresses? Ad-hoc routing can work on small scales, but there'd be serious issues making a global network like that.

Wait, what?

Python as a choice of multithreading-enabled language? You are aware that CPython has a global lock and only one thread can execute Python code at once?
Javascript will be more multicore friendly than Python when web workers get widely implemented.

And what's the point of developing a brand new sub-set of python with a brand new interpreter and set of libraries? You might as well just compile python to javascript, there's not a lot of impedance mismatch between them. Python is mostly useful because of its wealth of libraries, other than that it's just a generic dynamically-typed language with a certain syntax.

I suspect it's simply impossible to create a non-corrupt government that manages a country that big and is so far removed from its citizens. Going back to the roots and organizing ourselves into something akin to city-states might allow us to keep closer control over the people we designate.
Diversity of laws can be a problem, but at least nowadays with online communications it'd be easier for such city-states to cooperate on treaties.
A question that arises is whether it wouldn't actually empower corporations more, with smaller states having smaller budgets than industry leaders.

Does this version clean up the mess that is their init system? Some init scripts were sysv, some were upstart-native in 10.04, and there was no commandline utility that made sense of it all.
I ran into that problem in the *server edition*, what is more central to a server installation than managing services?

Remind me, why do we have such a fragile system at the very core of modern civilisation?