I would say neither.  Both Sony and Microsoft have shown their ineptitude at making innovative products.

Don't worry, it will all end eventually.  You don't need to hurry it all.  Time is relative.

What I am really annoyed about is that it was not confidential because it would tell the enemy what the government is doing.  The information was classified so that the America people would not be informed of the program and thus could not sue on constitutional grounds.  The courts have said secret programs cannot be found to be unconstitutional because they are secret and no one knows if they are actually occurring and no one knows who they are occurring on.

The point of it being confidential is so the public does not know and does not stop the program from occurring.

One interesting thing that I heard on the radio discussing privacy is that as the world becomes more connected and information is digitized privacy of the public becomes less but secrecy also becomes less of these programs.  In he past information was in hard copy and thus hard to disclose.  Now that many people have more access to information because it is digitized and keeping networks has become more specialized the secrecy of these programs is less easy to conceal.

Please reread what I wrote.  I never mentioned an Axis of Evil.  I mentioned the Axis Powers which were Germany, Italy, and Japan during World War 2.  I was not justifying war, I am explaining why governments are concerned with terrorism over other things that may cause more deaths than terrorism.

It is not about how many people are killed.  States survive and propagate based on their ability to have stability so that they can effectively trade with other nations so a critical percentage¹ of their population prospers.  If on 9-11 people decided to fly planes into Happy Chef Restaurant in Kadoka, SD then no one would give a damn.  Flying a plane into the World Trade Center in New York City stopped market trading for days and shut down civilian United States air traffic.  Imagine if people were blowing themselves up on buses, bridges, or police stations in every major US city at least once a month.  It would shut down any ability for people to go out and make transactions and other nations would be able to take that opportunity to take over that wealth generating ability.

This is why the United States is pivoting its naval units to Asia to counter China's naval rise and oversee that international trade routes are not disturbed.

Obama knows he cannot keep his base and perpetuate the War on Terrorism (WOT) that Bush started.  Bush thought this included massive military invasions and nation building.  It might have worked but Bush underestimated the resources needed for this to happen.  During that time a lot of people mentioned the success World War 2 (WW2) and the nation building after that.  The difference between WW2 and the WOT is that the United States was involved in total war, the complete mobilization of its resources to defeat the Axis Powers.  This was not the case during the WOT.  People went along with their daily lives and let the volunteer army try to achieve nation building.  Obviously they failed.

Obama's strategy, and it is a very smart one politically, is to think of terrorist cells as cancer and to surgically remove that cancer through annihilation and/or fear.  Annihilation comes from drone or special operation strikes.  Fear comes from people that see that the United States military can't be everywhere at the same time but can be anywhere it wants to go.  For this to work the national security industry must collect as much data as possible and strike any overseas target that may have any evidence of wanting to attack American interests.

The American people will only allow this level of surveillance if they don't feel safe, and if the goal of the government is to create stability so that enough people are happy that they don't overthrow the government then the government is stuck in a difficult situation.  If the people don't feel safe then they will be unhappy and overthrow the government and if they do feel safe then they won't allow this level of surveillance and then the government cannot execute their surgical military operations.

¹ I believe this critical percentage is related to the percent of unhappiness and the ease of access to efficient weapons and or voter turnout (democracies can overthrow their governments in elections, that is why they are more stable long term).

I figure people that want to withdrawal USD from MtGox and buy bitcoins to transfer them to another exchange to sell them would still want to withdrawal their USD.

And then go to another exchange and crash there.

Looks like they only send to people that have recently done a withdrawal/deposit or are currently trying to do a withdrawal/deposit.

Just got the email too

March 29 2013

Two weeks later...

Until the BFL's ASIC are confirmed being shipped and not some April Fool's prank, those 7 BFLs are vaporware and should not be priced in Cognitive.  Also, to only price Cognitive in BTC is a mistake.  I have been pricing everything in my local currency as can be seen in my earlier posts.  As an article today better explains than I could ever:


Any new person just getting into bitcoin and then using their bitcoins to purchase shares of Cognitive would be paying a price of the BTCUSD * COGNITIVE.  For example, at the peak, if someone wanted to purchase Cognitive they would have paid $260 * 0.1 = $26.00/share.  This is in contrast to the IPO in which Cognitive was about $2.50/share.

Is that overpriced?  I am not sure as the BFLs are a mystery.  At some point after all the missed deadlines by BFL they should be written off.

A lot of people that have been around for a while are like large shareholders.  They don't really care about the price because it is not like they can cash out without crashing that price.  Most of them shaved off a small percent of bitcoins and sold enough in the bubble to fund their projects for a while.

The real skill is to not only know when to get out of a market, but when to get back in as well.

Go get some books.  You are in for hurt asking around here.

Didn't Mark Cuban make a billion on some sports website and buy the Mavericks?

Reading the comments does not look very good.

I agree with your statement but one thing that a pure bitcoin investment cannot do is pay dividends every week to the owners of bitcoins.  If bitcoins continue is appreciation other people might buy into bitcoin at increasingly higher prices but a mining fund would consistently get more bitcoins from their initial investment.  This fund was hit when more shares were used to purchase the BFL ASIC.  It cut the dividend per share because their were extra shares but no extra incoming revenue.  At that point the dividend being paid out could not be the only metric for the book value of the fund.  There is also the value of those ordered ASIC that need to be taken into consideration when pricing the fund.  There is also the bitcoins held in reserve that the fund has.  It may use those bitcoins to purchase more ASIC but it could also just pay a large dividend as well if that is more beneficial.  Another important thing is how the fund is well managed.  Just look at some other funds (ex. BITBOND) and see how much risk a bad manager can add to your investment.

I would not be surprised in the future that as the ASIC are delivered and as the fund grows less of the fund's bitcoin revenue will need to be held in reserve for future growth.  Once the fund becomes a growth fund then investors will not have to worry about share dilution and their initial investment may outperform bitcoin's rate of appreciation.

At this level of deflationary pressure of the bitcoin exchange rate there is a good argument to just sit on coins.  Although, I do believe we should have some ASICs first.