especially with all that money the Nigerian Prince has been trying to send me... It's about time he put it to good use!

over 85% of statistics are made up? :)

Seriously tho.. popular tech.. incoming IPO.. someone is surprised that a company padded numbers?

This might be a bit of a stretch.. but if you want some "encryption" on your printed copies.. have you considered using a font like wingdings or webdings to use as the print font? I was thinking about some of the previous posts regarding Egyptian glyphs and tho it's not a solid "encryption" (more obfuscation).. It would be a security deterrance, if anything. And if you need to "decrypt" your text you could utilize an in-hand charmap to decode it and OCR should allow you to scan it in with "read as font". Just an idea.

When I worked as a SysAdmin (on to an IT Manager) at a Healthcare system, I inherited a PC system spanning 16 counties, 300 machines all running various iterations of Windows on a mixture of new and incredibly aging machines. We spent so much time and wasted so much money on supporting some of these machines in the remote sites that I eventually got fed up and made a PXE booted custom mini-Linux distro (I dubbed it Spork Linux because it was so damned handy) that included basic web browsing, rdesktop (rdp client), citrix client, helpdesk access and a few misc tools and just setup a central Windows terminal server. This gave us better control over what people were accessing and where, removed licenses for apps that some people really didn't need.. (c'mon.. how many people really needed Microsoft Office suite? So.. we set OpenOffice and made them think some of them had MS Office.. LOL) and helped us "recycle/reuse" some old machines that now acted simply as dumb terminals but booted up in about 5-20 seconds since all that extra bloat wasn't there anymore. After all that license reclaiming and monitoring how much we spent on travel, repairs, etc.. we saved over 75,000$/year easily. It's definitely not that impressive but when you considering that's for a small org covering the geographic distance of a US state.. that's decent enough.. those numbers from the UK government don't surprise me all that much in comparison considering how many machines/people/locations they'd have to support. It's wasteful and awful, but unless someone changes it.. and for the better, they are going to hemorrhage money.

Fork over some money, Micro$oft, if you want it that bad...

I really like the concepts and implementation of bitcoin.. but the whole movement reminds me of the Beanie Babies explosion.

The fad gets popular. Lots of people get on the bandwagon. Knockoffs and too much silly varieties dilute the brand. Fad dies. People left with unopened Beanie Babies in storage boxes hoping/thinking those goofy little stuffed animals will be worth something again.

Bitcoin is an awesome experiment in virtual finances. But it's rocked with inconsistencies with different groups trying to contribute/regulate/organize things and in doing so that they are becoming part of the problem, not the solution. I honestly expect bitcoin to go down the drain at some point with alot of these bitcoin mining rigs gathering dust or maybe working on something worthwhile like Folding@home or Seti@home projects. It's just sad about the amount of power all those rigs consumed trying to mine virtual money. Just seems like a waste. My 2 cents.