tnguy

  Because you know, personally, everyone who writes every piece of software you use?   The Bitcoin software is open source. Anyone can look at the source-code who wishes to and many have.

  Who said it was stable?

  Satoshi Nakamoto. Not a real person. A pseudonym which no one seems to know who it is. Mysterious, eh? :)   In truth, there's probably a few people who know who this is. Speculation is that it may be a small group of people from the academic community.

  Yes. Basically, an exchange (at one time the major exchange) which had been acting in suspicious ways for a long time finally went under. It is unfortunate and potentially somewhat damaging but not fatal. In many ways, it is better that it is finally (hopefully) over.

Or on a piece of paper such as the ones I have pinned up on my cube wall for demonstration purposes (they are unfunded).

  Nothing wrong with waiting. If you don't understand it and why some of us believe it will become ubiquitous, it would just be a gamble (one that has proven fairly lucrative so far but nonetheless.)

  Up 60 dollars since yesterday and more than that (180) since the bottom of the last few days. Seems real dead to me...   (Oh, actually touched 610 last night).  

  Pretty hardcore. Do you go to the rally?

  Congratulations. You won't save a penny but you'll have a lot of fun not doing so.

  Sure. There are several moving parts, some of them arbitrary but here are the essential points:   Bitcoin is a protocol.   It is distributed. This means no central control. Changes can only effectively be made if agreement is reached by the owners of more than 51% of computing power.   Bitcoin is a transaction ledger. There are no "bitcoins" as such. It just records that one person has transferred a value to another (or, more strictly, that the owner of a private key has signed the transaction of transferring a value to a public key). It can actually also be used to record other things as well.   A Bitcoin "Wallet" is actually just a collection of private keys used to sign the aforementioned transactions. It contains no bitcoins at all.   Obviously, if this were just the case, there would be no value to transfer. Initial values are created by "miners" solving cryptographic puzzles. When the puzzle is solved the miner (or miners in the case of pooled mining, which is the majority case these days) receive a block payout (Or rather, it is recorded in the ledger that they mined that value).   The block reward is adjusted on a schedule such that there will never be more than 21million bitcoins mined (the block reward is halved periodically). The protocol is designed so that blocks are found on a fairly regular basis (with some fluctuation).   Transactions are processed at the discretion of the miners. Each transaction can include a transaction fee. Miners receive the transaction fee. As the mining reward drops, it is designed so that miners continue to mine to receive these fees rather than new coins. Competition between miners should ensure that these fees are kept to a reasonable level.   Bitcoin is not anonymous. Though it can be made nearly so with some effort.   Exchanges, gambling sites, sites selling illicit materials and so on are not part of the Bitcoin protocol.   Many things that people think are Bitcoin problems often turn out to be fiat problems (when they're not just plain old people problems).       The usual dismissal of Bitcoin is that it is not backed by anything. In truth, it is backed by its utility (as with all things). It depends on what you think the utility of an inflation-proof global distributed transaction ledger is.

  GPU mining is about done. ASICS are the only real way now. You should be able to pick up used cards for cheap.

I didn't dig the "Hey, this dude here knows all about what caused it but there won't be any discussion about it so we can string the audience along for a bit" nonsense also.   And again with the full-auto stupidity. While the guy with the pistol does one-shot-one-kill a half dozen times in a row.

I still have mine. Plan to keep it that way for a while

Totally different things. One is just getting up earlier (which is what I advocated for those so inclined), the other is monkeying with what are (in truth) arbitrarily assigned numbers, causing untold lost productivity, missed appointments and sundry other ill-effects.

  [Citation needed]   I suspect most agrarian societies just got up when they needed to.

  This was also my argument when it first started about how it was so unrealistic that they *weren't* able to find stuff easily.   Really, a zombie apocalypse is one of the least-worrisome kind of SHTF situations. If you're talking Walking Dead type zombies anyway.

DST is an hour adjustment on the astronomical time so it's the "spring forward" that's the industrial-era nonsense. As an aside, the farmer thing is apparently a myth.

Noon: It's when the sun is highest in the sky. If you want to get up an hour earlier... Get up an hour earlier. (I will give you timezones, just to keep things simple and you have to account that there's a slight fluctuation of the highest point in the sky vs a 24 hour day but that's all).

Amazon S3. Depending on your requirements. There are a few other options that are also reasonable but it's just nearly impossible to beat Amazon right now.   You definitely want something that gives more of a workflow. At the current place, they use Jira but the previous place they used a version of Mantis that had been heavily modified (by me) but the base version should at least give you something to get started with. You'll find that between version control and more disciplined tracking of bugs, your workflow will be greatly improved. It'll also open doors that you didn't even consider before. It's not just for big projects and teams. I find these immensely useful just for myself. They also are invaluable as part of disaster recovery planning. (Just this Tuesday we had a critical guy not show up for work dead). And for what it's worth, I'm always a bit skeptical about the latest whizz-bang thing myself (except when I'm not) but good ideas are good ideas.

Lester, once you start using version control, you won't go back. I've used subversion a fair bit but it looks like I'm going to be doing a crash course in Git myself as it's a big part of the AWS strategy my company is taking.

Just to add that if you think you're being followed, you might not want to go directly to your destination, especially if it's where you live.

Lester: Have you looked at Wordpress? It seems fairly straightforward. I set one up myself but I find I rarely have a desire to share the minutiae of my life. I sometimes find out something I think it would be worth sharing with others though.

  I warn you, first one's free but it's all designed to draw you in. Amazon raises some "a bit too big" flags but (once you get past the free tier) their prices are very attractive. Though your site may not need to go that way.

Heck, it wouldn't even have to be all that strict. Make it for the tenth offense or something. These scumbags typically rack the charges up pretty quickly.