Just a suggestion. 

considering that BF is making a standalone USB miner that can also keep you coffee cup warm, is there any technical reason that a asic based heat trace cable that mines whenever the tempeture of the water drops below 45 degrees F cannot be produced as well?

Because you haven't written that code yet.

Neither would I, and I already own an android smartphone.  I use a prepaid service for $25 per month, paid mostly in bitcoins.

There are several.  Start with researching the 'light' clients defined in the original white paper and work from there.  The bitcoin network is a clearing network, and was never really intended to serve everyone directly.  Most people will, eventually, be accessing the bitcoin network indirectly by some kind of service.  Online wallets are an early example of this, as transfers between users of the same service don't require that a transaction hit the bitcoin network normally.  This is exactly like a bitcoin version of paypal, except if your wallet service upsets you, you can take your business elsewere.  It's also relatively easy for such services to interlink their users so that they can credit their users when a user from another service that they have a receprocity agreement with sends one of their users funds, but settle up on a regular cycle in a collective transfer; likely once each day.  This would only be beneficial for large user bases wherein the two services have a significant number of cross transactions that can be bundled up and largely cancel each other out.

Search for BitcoinSpinner, and understand how it works.  Search also for Stratum & Electrum; understand how they interact via an overlay network.  (basicly, one stratum server holds the blockchain for hundreds of electrum clients in a manner similar to, but more standardized than, the interaction of the BitcoinSpinner main server and the android clients.)

There are also special kinds of transactions that are intended to reduce network traffic.  For example, send-to-many allows one to pay out to huge numbers of bitcoin addresses at once, for one (otherwise lower) transaction fee.  Imagine if WalMart not only started accepting bitcoin, but employees had the option of taking their wages in bitcoin each week.  WalMart could literally pay their entire workforce in a single, huge, transaction; gathering  up the many small bitcoin payments to buy thing from WalMart from customers and paying them directly out to their employees in a single action.  Compared to paying each employee with his own transaction, there is huge savings to be had here.  To some degree, send-to-many would also allow a single household to pay out all of their monthly bills in a single action as well; although the gain of a couple dozen bills in one transaction versus ten's of thousands of employees would be significantly different.  Other specialized transaction types are being considered as well, including transactions that can be signed by multiple users independently or require multiple private keys to spend; as well as scripted transactions that pay the miners to process a script of conditions.  I'm sure I can't even imagine the number of ways this could be used to reduce resource usage.  Just off the top of my head, a scripted transaction might have an external reference to the inputs and/or outputs of that transaction; permitting the actual transaction to be small but compelling the miners to fetch the rest of the transaction from WalMart's Stratum servers.  No, I don't know how external blockchain reference would work either, but they could.

For that matter, a large online wallet service could offer 'cron job' payments for when users don't need to send a transaction immediately for less than it would eventually cost to send a speedy transaction in a congested bitcoin network future.  The fees are tiny now, but we can expect that their costs will rise to meet the market as well as to compensate the miners for the increasingly large amount of network resources that they will have to pay for in order to run their mining businesses.  Right now a single transaction costs about a nickel, but a year ago it was about half a cent.  If in another year, the cost is 50 cents, we will see more people willing to defer to a delay to save on that fee; which the current network permits.  In the future, free transactions may or may not be completed in a realistic timeframe; but one way or another the fees will adjust to the demand.  If you need that transaction to clear in an hour, you are going to have to pay for the privilage.  If you can wait a day or two, you can expect to save money if you permit your wallet service to bundle your transaction up with others.  If you can complete the transaction via an external network, many will favor those networks whenever prudent.  If you are paranoid about your funds, you will still be able to maintain your own full client, but you will bear the costs yourself.

I explained why this is a while back in this thread.  The law prohibits the insurance company that provides your employer's plan from allowing you to pay to continue your own coverage, so if you are without an employer, you're a mark.

There are some solutions, though.  One is what I do, a medical savings account.  Another is to join a cooperative, but those are often religiously based these days.

http://www.chministries.org/
http://mychristiancare.org/medi-share/
http://www.chausa.org/

You guys worry too much.  No, the bitcoin network could not scale to the point that every person on Earth has a full client.  Yes, there are known pathways to deal with that, which have been generally known since Satoshi's white paper and are now very well understood.  No, they are not yet coded.  Yes, there are people who are working on those implementations at this time.

Furthermore, if you can't afford care in the US, you are eligble for medicaid.  Literally anyone over the age of 26 below the poverty line can get medicaid, and a great many other people outside those conditions as well.  Two of my nephews qualify for it, because they were both briefly in foster care as tots.  This was due to a misunderstanding & failure of a new CPS agent, but even one night in foster care and you are eligble for medicaid for life.  Also, in state university tuition.

Two of my children are also eligible, due to the fact that they were adopted from foster care.

Additionally, there are more than a dozen less broad federal programs to subsidize health care, not counting the state programs that receive federal block grants.  There is literally no one in the US that cannot get care, and I challenge you to find one that I can't refute.  Our systems of social support are disjointed, confusing and largely unkown; but they are complete.  The major differences is that most of the public in the US is unaware of these programs, unlike in single payer nations where it's obvious.

Hell, I'm upper middle class, and I could get coverage for life at the VA should I lose my other health care resources; but my wife could not.

Bullshit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18407768

BTW, in any system that requires delays for any life saving treatments, such as cancer screening or dialysis, this is indirect rationing because some of those people will die because of those delays.

So sueing the NHS because you were denied care, if your life expectancy is already shorter than the resolution process in the courts, is still rationing.  Old age is 100% fatal, it might just take longer for some than other.

Not any change.  The irony is that the only way that this bill makes health care cheaper overall in the US, is if rationing of care is widespread like in Britain.  Honestly, it's not likely to affect me either way because I have a medical savings account & can afford insurance; but I do find it offensive that I'll be taxed even more to pay for the requirements in Obamacare that I would not pay for in my own insurance plan.  Forcing me to pay for another person's contraceptive pills or abortion because they can't afford it is forcing me to subsidize them to have sex without consequences.  In the most religious first world nation on Earth, this is dangerous.

As for Obamacare, I say this recent ruling that it's valid because it's a tax still scuttled the bill in it's entirety.  Even if Obama wins another term and the repubs fail to retake the Senate, the court's ruling that it's a tax despite the government's claims also makes it unconstitutional simply because it wasn't passed in the manner that a tax must be passed according to the Constitution itself.  The Constitution explicitly says that all revenue (taxes) must originate in the House.  This means that 1) the senate cannot initiate the bill and 2) the senate can only pass or deny the version that the house provides it or any amendments that the senate approves must return to the house for a revote.  Obamacare was passed via 'reconsiliation', which is a method of syncronising bills, but is invalid for a new tax.  Also, the version that was 'deemed passed' during reconsiliation was the senate version.  So as a tax, it was passed unconstitutionally under two different arguments right there.  Even if it never gets that far, a repeal of a tax cannot be filibustered in the senate; so if the repubs take back the senate and keep what they have in the house (something that I consider a reasonable likelyhood), the dems in minority cannot stop the bill with a filibuster.  Obviously Obama would veto it, but it would be futile because a veto overide requires a 2/3rds majority vote of both houses of congress in a joint session.  In other words, assuming the repubs keep their numbers in the house & a single vote majority in the senate, the repubs would have the supermajority in a joint session.

This thing is over and done, it won't last long enough for the provisions to even begin.  It will last long enough for both sides to make huge political hay about it though.

There are notable exceptions to every rule, but generally speaking whenever the private sector screws something up, someone loses their investment and then some other company comes in to fix it.  That does not mean that government engineers can't build a hydroplant.  Still, there is no reason to believe that government did a better job than a private project could have in the same location operating under the same conditions.

I live in Louisville, Kentucky; a city that has a (relatively small) hydroplant literally at the downtown riverfront.  There is a natural waterfall here that was partially developed into a lock & dam, and the dam part includes a 10 megawatt hydroplant.  It's not remotely enough to power the city anymore, but when it was built it powered everything.  It's technically owned by the government, since it's part of the locks, which is government infrastructure.  For all practical purposes, though, it's maintained by a private contractor for the local power company.



Indeed, but most of those great wonders were built against the will of those who paid for it.  Even the Hoover Dam couldn't get a majority of the taxpayers to think that it was a good idea, because the vast majority of those who contributed were (and are) beyond the range of benefiting from it.

Probably, but there are laws that prevent any hospital from favoring patients due to their insurance company, so an insurance company would have little to gain from owning a hospital itself.  These are old laws that were put into place in order to undermine 'mutual benefit associations' from the 1920's and earlier.  Such associations were as close to a heath care cooperative as could have existed, and some were powerful enough to hire their own general practitioners; thus running their own practice for the benefit of their membership.  Both doctors' associations & insurance companies lobbied governments to 'regulate' such practices on such arguments as "demeaning employment" to the young doctors who took such positions to "anti-competitive" non-profits killing the insurance companies.  There is a small resurgence of this kind of thing today under a different legal description, concierge medical practices, but they are developed by the doctors themselves, not a non-profit cooperative.  The end results are similar, though.  On such practice association is SimpleCare.  (http://simplecare.com/index2.asp)  They all claim to only be 'cash only' practices, but most of them have an 'annual membership fee' that is somewhere between $200 and $3000 dollars, depending upon all that it includes and the repuation of the doctor.  At the high end of that range, you often end up with your new doctors actual cell phone number, and an agreement that he will respond to at least a minimum number of emergency calls per year.

Part of that was because Satoshi also coded a minimum difficulty into the algo, which was high enough that one cpu was never going to be able to reach that mark.  Since there were no gpu miners yet, this required that a number of other players jump into the game before the 10 minute target interval could be obtained.

No, he can't.

You don't get it for free, there is an opprotunity cost associated with 'hoarding' cash.  The interest lost due to favoring cash over lending is just one example of that opprotunity cost.

This should be a lesson to all newbies.  Bitcoin removes the need for a trusted third party, but it does not remove the need to trust your counterparty.  If you don't do your due diliigence, you can exkpect that sooner or later you are  going to run into a con game.  I'm not saying that BFL is a con game, but I have yet to hear of anyone who has received their paid order.  If you get screwed, this is not bitcoin's fault.  It woks like cash, and trusting someone on the Interent because he has a slick website is like buying a genuine gold Swiss watch from some guy you met in an ally.  Just because it was half off, doesn't mean that you didn't get scammed.

There it is, right there.  Your great fallacy.  Money doesn't try to do anything.  It's an inanimate object and/or an abstract concept.  Money doesn't do anything that people who use it aren't trying to use it for, and if people wish to use it as a low risk store of value, then that is what it is for.  Any attempt to design a monetary system that deliberately tries to alter the behavior of those people to do with it what they will is doomed to failure so long as there exists an alternative that avoids those 'features'.  Since such a cryptocurrency already exists, designing an alternative to bitcoin that uses demmurage must have some other overwhelming advantage to the user to ever stand a chance to develop an economy in the first place.

No, not normally.  The problem with the current system is that health care coverage is generally tied to employment, so six months after a layoff (or immediatly after a fire) both the employee and his family lose their insurance coverage because it's illegal for a seperated employee to continue to pay for his coverage via the health care plan he had with his former employer.



It's dominated by for-profit insurance companies, but that doesn't prevent non-profits from existing.  But there are regs that make it hard for any employer to favor a non-profit unless the employer is also a non-profit.  Since very few people work for non-profits in the USA, very few non-profit insurance agencies exist.


They used to be owned by religious organizations, primarily, and still generally keep their legacy names (There is a Jewish Hospital in every city, for example) However, laws pased during the 70'sunder Carter forced most of these non-profit hospitals to sll out to for-profit corporations.


Mostly closed ownership, but you can buy stock into some mega-medical investment groups that own stock in uge numbers of different hospitals.

If you're not a sceptic, you don't believe in good science.  Time will show the truth, but it largely has.  The computer simulation models used to support GW politics have been consistantly wrong in the short term, who in their right mind would believe that they could be inaccurate in the first few years and get more accurate in 100 years?  Predictive simulations don't work like that, proven by the 'butterfly effect' theorm.

The irony is that the best long term weather predictive models that we have today are pencil/paper models developed in the early 1800's.  The track record of The Old Farmers' Almanac makes these modern supercomputer aided models look like they were developed either by amatures or frauds.