Doesn't the authentication of Bitcoin transfers take something like half an hour? That doesn't exactly cut it for retail stores.

You would use a 9-year-long migration as a success story? Also, Excel has many useful features not in Calc, that I couldn't live without. I'm an actuary, and none probably work for a municipality, but I can see accountants and the like getting a lot of use out of them.

Except that 70% of Republicans in that district are in favor of immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship, so essentially what Cantor was proposing. If that's among the Republicans, I would expect people to the left of that to me more in favor of it. Where are those polls you talk about?
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

Except that millions of years ago the poles had no ice cap.

You had me, up until you referenced how many articles Wikipedia has. That shows you don't understand how sample sizes work, and thus statistics pretty much at all. http://www.angrymath.com/2010/...

I don't think just looking at rate of gun ownership is the answer. At least in North America, most gun homicides are committed with handguns, but most of the guns in Canada are rifles and shotguns, so I think it's quite possible there's a very strong correlation between rate of handgun ownership and murder rate.

If you have a mortgage on a decent apartment or house in SF or NY, between that and your 101k that's probably at least a million by the time you pay off the place.

So? It doesn't matter why people want them, just that they do (with regards to determining their value).

Value is a function of supply and demand. A classic question in economics is why water is cheap, when it is essential to life, and diamonds are expensive, even though they just look pretty (of course, that doesn't hold totally nowadays, but the question is centuries old). The standard answer is that while people want both water and diamonds, there's a lot of water, but not a lot of diamonds. These basic forces also govern the prices of most things.

Well, US dollars have an incredibly high demand. The first part comes from how a couple TRILLION dollars are needed a year to pay taxes. The government won't take anything else for taxes, and will punish you if you don't pay what you owe, so that's a massive source of demand. The other is that US dollars are legal tender, and while that doesn't matter as much anymore, for a very long time most payments were made in cash, and if you received a service by law you could pay in USD and the merchants couldn't refuse it. That's still true but secondary, however the financial system is designed for it (in the USA of course) in large part because of that. So USD have intrinsic value because people NEED them to pay taxes, whereas bitcoins aren't needed for anything, and can't compare with a couple trillion dollars' worth of guaranteed demand.

The error bars on some of those graphs are so monstrously large it would be almost impossible for the real data to fall outside that range (in the first one, the margin of error for the forecast grows to a range of almost 0 degrees to 1). Anything with that much error has no real predictive value whatsoever.

BlackBerrys only store stuff in foreign servers by default. You can set up your own servers, with end-to-end encryption from them to the phones, and that's presumably what the Swedish police has done.

Bitcoin prices are very volatile. It's a death knell for a business if your revenue can drop by 50% or more in the space of a few weeks. You'd need to keep a ton of cash on hand just in case. While you might make more money in the long run mining bitcoins rather than selling rigs, it's very hard to run a real business that way. Selling the rigs is the lower-risk, lower-reward option.

They just started that product line. Microsoft looks at the long-term more than other companies. For example, the XBox originally made them lose billions, but now the newer versions are raking in the dough.

Generally, hearing aids only raise the volume for very select frequencies. What she's done is probably just ramped up the volume for everything. So she could end up with far worse hearing loss.

Regular workers vastly outnumber management. Pay of C*O level people at S&P 500 companies is generally a decimal of their total expenses, so axing their pay really won't change much for the average worker.